


Washed Ashore

by Kathar



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Conspiracy, Memory Alteration, Multi, Phil never joined SHIELD, Resolved Sexual Tension, Secret Identity, Unresolved Sexual Tension, backyard chickens, chicken injuries, don't get too attached to the chickens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-02-05 20:37:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 286,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1831450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kathar/pseuds/Kathar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil Coulson has been the Keeper of North Bar, and about half hermit, for fifteen years by the time he finds the wounded man lying on the beach in the wake of a storm. (Actually-- it was the dog that found him; blame the dog.) </p><p>Clint Barton has been a circus act, a mercenary, a spy, and a superhero-- now he’s a wanted man, and a half-drowned one to boot.  </p><p>When they start trying to clear Clint's name, events spiral out of control in ways they can't imagine. Their lives will never be the same -- and neither will the Avengers, SHIELD, and the entirety of Long Beach Island, NJ.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Washed Ashore

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the beta rotation of [Faeleverte](http://archiveofourown.org/users/faeleverte/pseuds/faeleverte), Beta J, and Beta B-- because this beast needs as many betas as it can muster. Most especially, thanks to Beta J for all the summer soap opera adventures, on the tv and otherwise, that led to this.
> 
> To those of you who know and love Long Beach Island, boats, or the Jersey shore in general, I apologize in advance for replacing Barnegat Light with Gansett Light, plopping an additional island in the middle of Barnegat Bay, and any unintentional inaccuracies. 
> 
> Washed Ashore is now complete. It originally posted as a serial between June 2014 and March 2015.

**One**

 

The world was wet and cold and smelled of leftover ozone. Hair stood up all over his body, conductive, and he shivered as he ran. The sand oozed beneath him and tried to suck him in but he skittered lightly, barely touching down. Sea-scent came from his right, too cold too big too loud too briney crashy splashy but there was something in it? Out of it? He turned, reluctant at first then stretching himself out as far as his stride could go when the smell of distress tangled in his nostrils.

Behind him, Big Hands Scruffy Face was calling:

“No, Lucky! Come zzzzz! Stay, zzz Zzzz zZZ dog!” 

Normally, he would have been butt-deep and squelching in sand by now, wagging his tail and waiting for the man to catch up, but the smell was pulling him on. It grew stronger with each sniff, until the shape resolved itself into a man, caught between sea and shore, covered in the slick watergrass that collected by the edge of the wet. A few isolated Hurty Blobs were stuck to him, and Lucky tried to nudge them aside with his paws.

Above him, Big Hands Scruffy Face had seen the man, and even if he couldn’t smell the seawater inside him, the lingering scent of gunpowder and the sharp tang of BLOOD, he seemed to understand that Things Were Bad.

“Good dog, Lucky,” he said as he hunkered down on his haunches, pawing at the other man urgently. Lucky sniffed around them both, looking up every once in a while to scan the beach for further oddities.

___

For the first horrified moment, Phil had been sure the man was dead; he’d hardly be the only dead thing Lucky had ever taken a shine to. (Decomposition is Delicious was Lucky’s motto, sadly.) It was when Lucky began nudging aside the little stinging jellyfish that had accumulated-- the ones that he’d learned with the first sting to sort from the kind that were mere glop-- that Phil began to run.

The man was breathing.

Oh, thank god, the man was breathing, and his cold skin fluttered under Phil’s fingers as they dug under the seaweed wrapping his neck. 

His blue lips began to move as Phil checked him over, and a spasm ran across his chest.

Long-dormant training and years of muscle memory reacted before Phil’s conscious mind could, and he’d heaved the man over on his side into the recovery position just in time for him to begin spewing seawater. Lucky jumped back; Phil kept one hand on the man’s neck and braced him, rubbing a thumb against the rapidly-increasing pulse point.

He did turn his gaze away, though, checking what he could see of the rest of the man’s nearly naked body for damage, as the man rendered up the ocean inside himself.  
____

As disasters went, it was no Sandy; that was about the most that could be said of the storm formerly known as Tropical Storm Fred, but it was saying quite a lot. 

Still, Phil thought as he glanced up at the eerily calm dark skies above him,despite losing its name when it came ashore and spent its power along Cape Hatteras far to the south, Fred had managed to cause a fair amount of fuss. The early stages had raised seas nearly to the top of the dunes he stood on now. Rain had bucketed down, carving its own channels deep into the sand on its way back to the belly of the bay. 

Fred had staying power, as well; it had taken a day and a half nibbling its way up the East Coast, and stalled over Atlantic City as if it had finally found something worth lingering over. In the early stages yesterday, all vessels had been ordered to take refuge and all the residences on the Jersey Shore, on Long Beach Island, and the other barrier islands had begun to put up boards and pull things out of range of the expected storm surge.

The low-lying island of North Bar was Phil’s own charge, from its big abandoned mansion in the middle to the power plant and concrete research bunkers along the shore to his own little seaside cottage and yard. He’d been glad there were no visitors when the storm began; it had allowed him to do his rounds with the efficiency of a decade and a half of routine. Lucky by his side was the only company he needed. Except that now, with so much still on his list of caretaker’s duties and with a half-drowned man on his beach, he would have been grateful for another pair of hands.

Where had this man come from? The barrier islands nearly visible across the little channel they sat on? Some damn fool boat that had thought it could make it to a berth further up the coast before the storm hit? There were several small shipping crates scattered about the beach, in various states of destruction. That gave credence to the small boat suggestion, but it was hardly confirmation.

Well, no answers were going be forthcoming from the mainland at the moment, not the way Fred had been tearing at the infrastructure. And they weren’t going to come from the bedraggled heap of human here on the beach with Phil, either. He was clad only in boxers, so there was no wallet to provide him answers. 

Nor could the man himself; he was clearly not going to last much longer in his semi-conscious state now that he’d heaved his insides dry. His head collapsed back down, cradled on a tanned shoulder. Phil watched for a moment as his face, scrunched up as he heaved, relaxed a little into unconsciousness, long lashes dusting his pale dirty cheekbones. His pulse was thin but steady under Phil’s fingers. If the man was going anywhere, it was going to be under Phil’s power and not his own.

Phil rocked back, beginning to arrange the man for lifting, and stopped when he found blood on his hand.

Ah, so that’s what had drawn Lucky, what kept the dog pawing at them both, even now. 

Muscles remembered far longer than Phil would have thought they could. His body moved nearly without Phil’s conscious volition from the moment he found the bullet wound in the meat of the man’s bicep. He tore a strip from his undershirt to bandage it, then slid his fingers across the broad expanse of shoulder, up and down the length of that barrel chest, those thick thighs. By the time he finished his clinical grope, he had an inventory and triage list set in his head: one bullet wound, a fair amount of bruising, cold nearly to the point of hypothermia, and terminally gorgeous. 

All that field medic training paying off again. It was in many ways the most useful thing he’d taken with him out of the Army-- by far the most long-lasting. Now, Phil thought, deliberately turning his mind from both the Army and the surprising way his body was reacting to stroking a deeply injured man, to see if he still had that dead-man’s carry up to par.  
____

Lucky streaked ahead of them, clearing storm wrack, chasing off seagulls, doubling-back to make sure his owner was following with his strange burden. Phil tried to concentrate on his boots sinking into the sand, on the looming clouds off in the distance, the increasing bite of the wind and the tang in the air that meant the storm wasn’t over yet. It was better than thinking about the surprisingly dense bulk of the man whose torso was tucked across his shoulders, or paying any heed to the fact that his hand could barely get a purchase on a bicep that broad. 

It was certainly better than thinking about what he was going to _do_ with an unconscious, half-drowned, wounded man when they got back to his cottage. The place was not exactly spacious; originally a boathouse before the dunes grew and left it high and dry, it had been converted to a caretaker’s cottage sometime ages ago. A new, larger, deluxe boat house with the ramps and rails and less dune and marsh had been built closer to the crossing to Gansett Township. Since that time-- back before the Second World War--subsequent caretakers of North Bar had built little additions to the cottage every which way, with the result that it was surprisingly easy to get lost in, for such a small space.

One thing they’d never paid a lot of attention to, sadly, was a guest room. Nor had Phil had need of one more than a handful of times in his nearly two decades of self-imposed semi-isolation and premature curmudgeonliness. The one spare room that held a daybed also held at least twenty boxes. He hadn’t tried to heat it for years.

And even if he got the man settled in somewhere warm, and got him food, there was the matter of his bullet wound, and the complete lack of communication with either the mainland or the larger island. 

“God I hope you’re as used to roughing it as you seem,” Phil muttered at the unconscious man, glancing vaguely in the direction of his head with its stupid thick lashes and surprisingly gentle lips. 

It was probably too much to hope that a miracle would occur and the phone lines would be up when he got home and someone would come and take temptation off Phil’s hands and put him in a nice sterile hospital bed and a backless gown.

Logistics kept Phil’s mind busy for most of the rest of the trek back, because it was certainly too much to hope for that kind of miracle. And intriguing as half-drowned handsome strangers were, the storm would be back soon, if the way the wind tossed the breakers was any indication. Phil had a lot of work to do, still. Perhaps he could forgo checking on the power plant and the concrete bunkers used for tidal power research. Those were built to withstand the depredations of the elements and absent-minded scientists. But he’d prefer to make sure the old mansion was battened down (and up, and sideways) and that nothing else had washed ashore.

His cottage hove into sight through an increasing veil of mist, and Phil realized the mansion would just have to batten itself. He barely had time to get them all inside before the sheet of rain hit.

 

**Two**

 

The second-- or maybe it was third-- time he woke up, he could finally focus enough to take in his surroundings beyond the basics of _warm_ and _dry_ and _not actively being shot at or tortured._ He’d seen worse.

He wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t hallucinating, though. It would explain why he appeared to be wrapped in blankets, lying on a-- leather? leather-- couch in front of an actual fucking fireplace with a fire blazing in the hearth and a large and aggressively scruffy dog curled up on a rug in front of it. 

The only other light was from the oil lantern perched on the old magazine table behind his head. There were candles on the mantle along with a few glass net weights, a fucking corncob pipe, a few gull feathers, and some kind of weird brass thing with a chain. 

Nautical paraphernalia dotted the rest of the low-beamed little room, along with, here and there, what appeared to be vintage 1940s war bonds posters. Dark curtains-- shabby even in the low light-- were drawn across a bank of boarded-up windows over a narrow built-in bench, along one edge of the room. Lightning flashed between the cracks, and the wind howled down the chimney.

Not that far from the ocean, then. Not nearly far enough to suit his post-drowning taste anyway. He hunkered down in the blankets, drawing the momentary interest of the dog, who huffed at him but didn’t get up.

And that was about it, really. He wasn’t gonna be going anywhere anytime soon, and it was quiet, and dark, and fuck the storm, he was so tired of the storm, he was just… tired. (And naked except for his now-mostly-dry boxers, but he’d been that way before the beach.) It was no kinda shape to be wandering around out there in. Even thinking about moving a limb was enough to make him want to weep, so clearly he wasn’t going to be wandering around in _here_ , either. Wherever _here_ was. Whoever had put him on the couch didn’t seem to be actively trying to torture him, so sleep seemed the best option.

He’d nearly drifted off into a pleasant haze when the dog perked up again and whined, staring at the doorway behind him.

Clint turned his head, wincing, and peered over the top of the couch.

There was a swamp person in yellow foul weather gear dripping in the doorway. It tilted its head at him a little and chuckled.

“Good to see you’re awake, and alive” it said, in a fairly pleasant sort of baritone, and then it sloughed off the soaked coat and hat and metamorphosized into an Irish folk singer. 

No, no, the shoulders were far too good for folk singer; fisherman.

And maybe Scottish, or proper New Englander, or whatever-- someone who looked absolutely at home in one of those bulky cabled sweaters and a pair of boots that came halfway up his knees, anyway. 

(Oh, and _nice_ hands, calloused and firm on Clint’s forehead, where he was feeling for a fever. Soothing.)

“I suppose awake, alive, _and_ coherent would be too much to ask?” the voice continued, and Clint smiled up at it-- tried, anyway-- and met the kind of eyes that… yep. Actually fucking twinkled.

Twinkling fucking eyes. 

Clint was probably hallucinating again.  
“Hi,” he rasped, in lieu of asking the guy why his delirium was taking the form of seaside cottages and cozily-bearded fishermen and scruffy sleepy dogs.

“Well. That’s a start,” said the possible hallucination, and a smile twitched on his face-- or so Clint assumed. At least the whiskers moved upwards. He stood up. “I need to go back out to check on the hens, make sure none of them wash away in the storm.”

And that proved he was a hallucination, this hen-checking possibly-Celtic twinkly-eyed, bearded baritone dreamboat. Because what?

“Kay?” Clint said, pretty eloquently, he thought.

“Before I do, though, do you need me to help you take a piss?”

Oddly, that was what convinced Clint this was all real.

 

**Three**

 

“I… I kinda do, yeah, sorry.” 

Phil only realized when the stranger said it, that he was really hoping not to hear those words. He’d been a goddamned soldier, he’d seen rafts of dicks in non-sexual situations. Nor was he going to make this one sexual. 

He guessed he just didn’t like being relegated to nursemaid. 

“Okay,” he said and then, since he was about to be holding the man up while he pissed, it seemed only polite to introduce himself. “I’m Phil, by the way.”

The man stared back at him for a long moment, backlit by the fire so his expression was well-nigh unreadable.

“I, uh, Frank,” he said eventually. “I guess.”

“You… guess?” In all his worry over the man’s bullet wound and general bedraggled state, Phil hadn’t even thought to check for head wounds beyond anything that would have caused more blood loss. _Now_ it was occurring to him to do so, and he was reaching underneath the man’s head before he’d stopped asking the question.

It was the flinch that stopped him, the way the man recoiled from his sudden movement. Phil put up his hands and plastered on his best harmless hermit smile. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Just trying to check your head. Sounds like you might have knocked yourself good.”

“Yeah? Maybe,” the man said, and rearranged himself on the sofa to get Phil more firmly in his view. “What made you think it, though?”

“You don’t sound very sure of your own name,” Phil said, trying to keep his tone light and ignore the fact that the way the guy’s face scrunched in confusion was unexpectedly compelling. Unconscious, he had been kind of ageless, full lips and nose softening an otherwise hollowed face. Lucidity had drawn a scowl on him, and when it disappeared Phil had to work hard not to lean right in. Again.

Hell.

“Huh, yeah.” The guy felt the back of his own head, then glanced at his palm as if expecting to find blood. “I don’t think so? ‘Course I wouldn’t remember, would I?”

“I suppose not,” Phil frowned. It was the last thing he needed; the seas were still too rough to get him off the island by boat. An airlift seemed excessive-- if it could even be achieved at the moment-- if only he could be sure he’d really found all the trauma.

“No, no, I don’t need the hospital,” the man said in a rush, and Phil realized he’d voiced some part of his thought out loud. “Really. Look, you can wake me up every four hours or whatever it is for concussions. Just… can I take a piss now? Please?” He lifted up those sinewy arms as if expecting to be picked up, and Phil gulped.

“Sure,” he said, draping the guy over his shoulder and cursing the fact that he hadn’t found him any clothing. “Let’s go.”  
___

Attempting to piss while he could barely stand on his own was not going well, unfortunately. Phil was holding him up but had his eyes averted out of whatever sense of delicacy crusty fishermen had about these things. It left Clint to try and fumble things on his own-- not that he was gonna ask for help with his own dick, good fucking god. He’d have to actually have a head injury before being that far gone, even for someone that smelled as good as the man currently holding him up.

Uh, which was a bad thought to have when he was about to whip it out, since he didn’t want to startle the guy.

Clint gave up after the third attempt at getting his dick out of the fly one-handed failed-- maybe he _had_ hit his head after all-- and just pushed his boxers down. 

A wet smack brought Phil’s head back round, and they both stared at the floor together.

“Okay now, _that_ was unexpected,” Clint said, blinking down at the jellyfish that had slipped out of a _very_ intimate place and plopped into the circle of his boxers leg. “Swear I wasn’t trying to smuggle sea creatures or anything.”

Phil’s laughter, when it came, was a revelation. It lightened the entire _room_ , never mind just his face.

“Damn,” Clint breathed, and pretended he was talking about the jellyfish still, when Phil glanced over at him.

"It happens to everyone sooner or later," Phil replied. "Just be glad it wasn't the stinging kind. I got one of them stuck once. Didn't get back in the water for a week after. My balls'd shrink up at the very sight of waves."

Clint's own laughter felt good, weirdly relieving, until it hit his bladder. The resulting slosh reminded him what they were there for, and he reminded Phil, and things happened quite efficiently after that. He was bundled back up on the sofa, a pleasantly empty feeling in his stomach, before he quite noticed how he’d gotten there.

Phil did a number of other brisk, competent little maneuvers that enhanced his comfort (as much as anything could do considering his condition) and then gave him a little space, with a promise to check on him in a few hours.

Clint slid down and curled into himself and stared at the fire a little more, trying to sort his head out.

He was going to have to get better before the storm lessened, or this Phil’d move heaven and earth to get him to a hospital.

Which was really just a slight detour on the way back into detention in a SHIELD cell-- if not back to the bottom of the ocean or off a dock in Atlantic City or wherever. He’d just fucking _come_ from there, he thought, and he had no plans to go back. 

He just had to get well quickly, give the vaguest truth possible about how he’d gone overboard, and keep Phil from asking what he’d been doing _before_ that….  
____

Light-- firelight?-- filtered through water, and wet streaked his hand.

The dog was licking him awake.

Clint reached out to scratch behind a furry ear, and was rewarded with another enthusiastic lick for his trouble.

“His name’s Lucky,” Phil’s voice floated from behind him. Because of course it was. Clint looked at the happy, one-eyed dog staring back at him, then up at his bearded savior where he was hovering above the couch holding on to something steaming in a pottery mug, then back at the dog. “Well, it beat the alternatives. I’ve got broth,” he set it down on the coffee table in front of Clint, and the smell nearly knocked him backwards. “If you can sip.”

“I can sip,” Clint rasped, but made no move for it. He’d stiffened during his nap, and the prospect of sitting up wasn’t at all attractive. If he could just take a moment to gather himself, before Phil noticed….

Too late. Phil clearly noticed, because somehow Clint found himself propped up on the couch, one long, calloused hand holding the mug of broth up to his lips while another cupped the back of his neck. 

“Hens, is it?” Clint mumbled when his mouth and vision had cleared after the first sips of broth had slid down his throat, chickeny and rich. Phil chuckled.

“None of mine in there, if you’re worried,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to check on them, yet, so we may yet see a few in broth in coming days.”

“Sorry.” Clint tried to ignore the “we” in that sentence, and found he couldn’t. The implications of one tiny word loomed pretty big. “‘We’?” he said.

“Ah, well, the bridge is out,” Phil told him, looking away at the fire. “And the phones are down, and the wireless network is jammed, and the storm is still going out there. The motor’s swamped on the runabout, and I’d really prefer not to try the skiff in these seas, unless you’ve got lots of internal bleeding.”

They both looked down at Clint’s stomach for no clear reason.

“Don’t think so,” he whispered back. Not that there was any way for either of them to tell, he didn’t point out.

“I’ll get you to a hospital as soon as I can. You know where you are?”

It was a relief, weirdly, to be able to answer that one honestly.

“Not really. On some island, I guess?” he said, and Phil grunted.

“You guess right. This is North Bar; it’s a private island. We’re in Barnegat Bay, if you know where that is; not quite a barrier island ourselves, but right at the tip of Long Beach Island.”

“But none of that is going to do us any good at the moment, since we can’t contact anyone. And I can’t ask the neighbors for help; apart from the chickens, you’ve met everyone who lives here. So, we’re on our own right now, and it would help, Frank, if you could tell me what happened to you?”

Clint heaved in a breath. Now for the truth or… never, probably. Phil was looking down at him, his expressions tucked away behind his beard, eyes dark in the shadows where the fire didn’t hit them, his high forehead wrinkled thoughtfully. The man _still_ looked like he belonged sometime else, someplace else, not just off the fucking Jersey shore. This wasn’t a guy who catered to the vacationing throngs that migrated back north when the last fireworks of Labor Day faded from the sky. 

This guy, his dog, his chickens and this little island he’d washed up on-- they weren’t that big a part of the larger world; couldn’t be, or Phil’d never have bothered to ask Clint his name. Wouldn’t have tucked him onto his couch, under a moth-eaten afghan, or propped him up and averted his eyes while Clint pissed. Not, at any rate, in that nonchalant fashion, as if Clint were just another consequence of the storm to tuck under hatches and splice back together. 

It wasn’t like his _face_ had been that common a sight in the papers before now-- other parts of him, sure-- but after the last few days? That had all changed, and not in a pleasant way. The anonymity brought its own comfort and, hopefully, a measure of safety. A chance to keep this little haven safe and hidden. If Phil knew who he had on his hands, though-- Hawkeye the Avenger (Hawkeye the fugitive, a voice in his head whispered)-- it all went to shit right there. 

Clint dug his fingers more firmly into Lucky’s fur, and accepted another sip of broth. 

“I think you must be right, I musta hit my head. I remember being on a boat, it being dusk. That’s about it.” He shrugged. “Not much after that till your couch and your dog,” _and your hands and your beard and a stupid fucking jellyfish_. “It’s all kinda a blank between.”

“Huh,” Phil said, and set the broth down. “Can I ask a few questions?” At Clint’s nod, he went through the familiar set: president, date, how many fingers, etc. Clint didn’t falter until he got to “what’s your full name? Why were you at sea?”

“Frank Barney,” he said after a long moment, knowing that by so doing he was leaping off the dock and praying the undertow was mild. “And why? Dunno. Like I said, it’s a blank for a bit before, but I remember the seas were pretty rough. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.” Phil’s frown was not unexpected, nor was the dart his eyes made towards the wound in Clint’s shoulder, but it threw him into alarm anyway. “It’s okay,” he half-babbled. “I don’t want you to try and move me right now. Not with the storm still going, like you said. Hate you to lose your chickens. Or house, or….” He drifted off at Phil’s hand on his shoulder.

“Then don’t agitate yourself, you idiot.”

Clint ducked his head, concentrated on the lumps of his bare knees beneath the itchy wool. Yeah, don’t agitate yourself, right. Only half of New York looking for you. Only half the world, maybe.

“What do you suggest, then?”

“More broth, more sleep.”

And what was he gonna _do_ while Clint slept?

“You’re not gonna try to… contact someone, somehow?”

“Not sure how I’d do that-- not even semaphore is going to work in this weather. But… we’ll play it by ear. As long as your head is feeling better, I won’t. Tonight. We’ll reevaluate tomorrow.”

It was such a sensible plan, presented in a matter-of-fact manner by the not-so-ancient mariner, that Clint couldn’t think of anything to do but say yes, and sip broth.

 

**Four**

 

Captain America was waiting for her when she stepped off the elevator into the split-level common room the Avengers shared at Stark Tower. He was leaning over the rail that led up to the kitchen area, backlit an almost celluloid silver by the stormclouds gathered outside the full-length windows. The studied, serious nonchalance with which he glanced back at her was not at all a good sign. Natasha Romanov took a moment, as she slipped her umbrella into the stand next to the door and shook the last drops of rain from her boots, to read what she could from his face.

Strictly speaking, Steve was Steve Rogers at the moment, not Captain America. He’d shed his uniform in favor of a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, both of which hugged his form in ways that probably had their makers weeping at the fulfilment of everything they’d been stitched for. His pretty pale face was twisted, with the particular tuck of eyebrow and pout of lip that meant bad news about a teammate.

 _Which_ teammate, though? If only Natasha could have believed that Tony had managed to blow up a lab or Bruce had hulked out in Times Square, or some other normal and domestic disaster, she’d have been very much relieved. But no, she doubted she was that lucky.

“They’re calling off the search,” he said when she raised an eyebrow at him, and Natasha sat hard, sinking far into the overly squashy suede couch Stark had insisted go in the common area. She curtained herself with her hair, not wanting to see anything, not wanting to be seen, just for a moment.

A truly spectacular rear sank down on the cushion next to her, and the displacement of mass was great enough she canted against Steve’s shoulder. She tried not to flinch but he felt her shiver, she knew he felt it because he put an arm around her for a brief squeeze. Which was even worse, damn the man.

“They can’t search in the storm, anyway, and if he was at sea like SHIELD’s reports suggest-- they say it’s unlikely he survived. Natasha--” he paused. Nat _asha_ , with that little hitch between the syllables that meant he was trying to remember that only Clint got to call her Nat. 

Only Clint _had_ gotten to call her Nat.

“No,” she said, and shook her head.

“I know,” he tried. “I agree. But unless you’ve found something that SHIELD, and the CIA, and the NSA, and the FBI, and the NYPD and the New Jersey State Police and half the covert and overt intelligence agencies in this goddamn world have missed?” He shrugged. “Clint was… Clint’s an Avenger. You can’t believe they haven’t been putting _everything_ they have into this.” She couldn’t raise her head to his gaze, because she was morally certain that he believed she was quite capable of beating the whole alphabet soup of agencies out. And he wasn’t wrong. She just hadn’t-- yet.

“Tell me about those SHIELD reports,” she said instead, and, when Steve got up and crossed to the window, if anything her heart sank further into that torturously plush couch. _Running away, Captain?_

“Agent Hand brought a packet over; I’ve left the copy on the counter.” He gestured up at the tiled counter that ran the length of the kitchen There was an honest-to-god eyes-only paper file neatly squared on it next to the translucent Stark-issue console tablet. It was a good try, but she waited him out, and after a moment his shoulders slumped and he continued. “They’ve found witnesses that state he was on a yacht belonging to some hot shot named Quinn. Hawkeye tried to steal something, but no one knows what. There was a scuffle, he fell off the boat-- they couldn’t find him and they couldn’t wait. The storm was coming up too fast.”

Now Natasha moved, coming to stand next to Steve and stare out at the gray curtain of rain as it swept along the rooftops and streets of Manhattan. She had not yet gotten used to that being her daily view, nor did she think Steve had. He came from the tenements, she from the shadows. Life in a high tower was too novel, too exposed, to be comfortable.

Clint hadn’t seemed bothered, but Clint Barton rarely _seemed_ bothered by little things like being dozens of stories up with glass-- however safety tempered-- all around. He’d taken the events of the last couple years, from being the puppet of an alien godling to the near-destruction of SHIELD, with the sure step of a tightrope walker. And the awkward sarcasm of a stand-up comic. Even becoming a media star, a superhero, didn’t seem to crack his sense of humor.

Underneath, he was as much of a mess as the rest of them, but Clint didn’t believe in showing his soft underbelly to anyone. To her, yes. Natasha was the repository of his thoughts and fears, but even she never got all of them, never saw all of him. 

Still, she was the one who’d sat by his side on the narrow bed as he came out from under Loki’s spell. She was the one who’d handed him his bow when they met beneath the dam the day they decided that the only way to save SHIELD was to burn HYDRA out of every limb, even if it took down the organization that had given them a home. They had walked into Stark’s tower shoulder to shoulder the day they left behind the life of spies to become Avengers. He had never failed to come back to her.

“He’s alive,” she said, voice coming out even. Steve nodded, staring at her face as it was reflected in the glass.

“That’s not all,” he said quietly. “They’re quite certain, now, that he was the one passing on the files that went missing from SHIELD. Hand says the timing fits, the place fits-- the drop was supposed to go down in Atlantic City, but Clint never arrived-- it _all_ fits. They think he might have been trying to gather proprietary information from Quinn’s files, as well.”

“If Clint had been doing that, no one would have been the wiser,” Natasha snapped.

“Clint wouldn’t _do_ that,” Steve replied, and his voice held all the conviction of the man who’d stood beside them as the Triskelion fell, and found it good. The man who’d talked around a brainwashed HYDRA assassin armed only with the certain conviction that he _was_ Steve’s friend. She found it equal parts impressive and irritating; irritation bubbled up now.

“And what are you going to do about it?” she asked him. His puppy dog stare was answer enough, in all truth, but she wanted to make him say it.

“I’ll continue to talk to SHIELD, I’ll continue to talk to everyone,” he said. “And I’ll continue to hope Clint turns himself in so we can get to the bottom of this.” He gave that little pout at her again, that _I know you’ll do the right thing_ twist, and she met his gaze steadily. “Natasha, if I knew which direction to go, where to search for him or how to clear his name I would do it in a heartbeat. But I don’t. SHIELD’s trying, too. They’re not his enemies. No one _wants_ Hawkeye to be guilty. Least of all Director Fury. We may have our differences, but I trust him on that. Clint needs to come back.”

“It’s no good telling _me_ that,” she said. _And it’s no good telling Clint that either. He knows the spy game too well to trust anyone right now. He knows that even the people closest to you might betray you unwittingly._ I _taught him that._

“I know,” Steve said, and buried his head in his hands. “I wish he’d come to us for help, Nat, whatever it was.” Ah, and now he _had_ forgotten. “I wish he’d just _asked_. This is not how… I never wanted to… I’m not going to bury an Avenger, Natasha.”

 _If SHIELD is right, the sea already did that for you,_ Natasha didn’t say. She just curled a hand around Steve’s forearm and squeezed.

“He’s not good at help,” she said, mild. It was the understatement of the century; every single evaluation from Clint’s intake forms on had some form of that statement on them. They were mostly disapproving, although some of his SOs-- Garrett, for instance-- had encouraged that self-sufficient streak. She mostly wanted to shake it out of him, but admitted that Garrett had a point; Strike Team Delta had been able to make its own way out of spots tighter than Steve’s uniform pants, all because they relied on no-one.

Except each other.

 _Clint you fool,_ she thought to herself. _Wherever you are, I’m going to find you. And I am going to force my help down your throat._

_____

To Be Continued....


	2. Safe Harbor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil takes stock of the storm damage to all his charges-- Frank Barney included-- and there is a visit to town. We are introduced to a new player, who is hiding a secret of her own, and Clint makes an unsettling discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains mentions of chicken trauma.
> 
> And that is a sentence I just actually wrote.

**One**

“We’ll re-evaluate tomorrow” quickly became “we’ll re-evaluate when communications are back up,” as Formerly Tropical Storm Fred seemed quite content to sit and play with itself in the middle of Barnegat Bay.

Frank Barney didn't mind the delay, sleeping most of the first day away with Lucky curled up at the foot of the couch. His bullet wound-- a clean through-and-through-- and his various bruises appeared to be responding well to the application of bandages, stitches (which Frank bore with a nonchalance that was nearly as intriguing as it was welcome) and rest. His head stopped hurting, or so he promised Phil, and for a while he seemed to be making up for lost time for his stomach, slurping gallons of broth and eating dry toast with abandon.

Phil could only wish his other charges were doing so well. 

The island itself was coming through all right, though the dunes south of his cottage were looking ominously crumbly. The skiff had been hulled by a branch from one of the few large trees on the island-- a lone blue spruce that some long-forgotten gardener had planted on purpose to piss Phil off and prove that the island’s ecological balance was extremely delicate. 

The chickens were in a precarious state; the satellite hutch he’d built them after they outgrew their original quarters (the mother-in-law hutch, as he thought of it) had been torn to pieces within hours. It was mostly tarps and 2” x 4”s, so no great loss, except that one of the falling beams had hit two ameraucanas and a buff orpington. The other hens had scattered; two had gotten beyond the chicken wire and were likely gone for good. He’d made the three injured fowl as comfortable as possible in little nests of sawdust and hay in the remaining shed, a low sturdy structure that was the product of wood salvaged from a rowboat that had washed up after Hurricane Sandy.

He hadn’t even bothered to check the mansion-- it would come through or it wouldn’t; it was the least of his worries. The electricity had stopped working at some point along the line, and that would have to be dealt with. Over the years, he’d come to know the power plant and the assortment of experimental tidal current generators, buoys, and surface attenuators that fed it better than any of the researchers who cycled in and out. Unless the damage was drastic, he likely wouldn’t have to wait for help from the mainland. Meanwhile, however, the entire cottage was lit by a combination of battery lanterns, oil lamps, candles, the fireplace, and-- intermittently-- lightning. At least the gas range could be lit by waving a match at the pilot. They might have to squint to see it, but at least they had hot food.

Still and all, Phil looked over at the sleeping dog guarding the sleeping man and more than once wished he could just curl up in the nearby armchair and join them.

___

 

The first day that the weather cleared and sunlight crept into the corners of the porches with their sand splatters, slid down the waterlogged remnants of the mother-in-law hutch, and pierced the plywood boards and curtains in the little den, Phil noticed a difference in Frank.

He was livelier than he had been, but his eyes darted towards Phil whenever Phil walked out of the room. Of the explanations for that phenomenon, Phil didn’t think it was to admire his backside. 

A muffled cough just after Phil had crossed into the hallway, on the afternoon of that day, stopped Phil in his tracks. There was silence for a moment, but when he went to move on, he heard it again; a sharp raspy hack. Phil closed his eyes briefly, and went to see what he could find in the way of dishes he wouldn’t mind someone heaving into. It was hardly a surprise that a man who’d nearly drowned would develop a problem with his lungs.

He’d brought the idea of the hospital up to Frank over dinner (broth, for a change).

Frank put the idea right back down, although he was no longer attempting to hide his hacking. It wasn’t a very wordy argument, just a variation on his “please lets just wait and see,” but the _pleading_ in his eyes stopped Phil’s “what if its too late by the time we see?” in its tracks. 

He pressed the argument a little longer for form’s sake, but truthfully, the only way to a hospital at the moment was going to be airlift, and there was time yet for that. When he said as much to Frank the look he got in return turned his insides to melted butter. 

It was all just exhaustion from the storm. Had to be. It had been less than a week since Frank had been naked and unconscious on Phil’s shore, there was no way Phil’s reaction owed anything to anything else.

____

 

The first time Phil came inside from the backyard to find the couch empty, he panicked. He wasn’t too proud to admit that. Turned the cottage upside down, checked in the bathroom, the pantries, the kitchen, his own bed-- anyplace he could think of that a wounded man might have dragged himself.

Lucky’s bark-- his very happy bark-- from the front porch stopped Phil in his tracks. Frank was outside, sitting nestled in among the dusty miller along the landward edge of the dune, fairly basking. Lucky was prancing around him, dropping sticks in his lap and leaping away when Frank flicked them down the yard. He looked up when Phil came out of the door, shading his eyes and smiling at Phil with damnably even teeth.

“Lucky wanted out,” Frank shrugged in response to Phil’s raised eyebrow. “Figured it was the least I could do to help.” He coughed a little at that, then a little more, then doubled over and pulled out the tupperware container Phil’d eventually settled on and began to hack into it. His back was bare to the afternoon sun, which warmed and burnished it. Phil willed the sunlight to bleach Frank dry, lungs and all. 

____

 

Several days after the storm had finally passed, Phil found himself as reluctant as Frank to bring him to a hospital. It had been unexpectedly nice, as Frank spent more time awake, to come around the corner of the cottage, or into a room, and find him sitting there with a book or a dog. (Or, once, to find him making a tiny little gun that fired matchsticks out of a clothespin. Frank’s sheepish grin as he set the gun down next to a catapult fashioned from a spoon and coffee mug, and a little bow that shot q-tip arrows, was devastating in its effect on Phil’s knees.)

In the evenings, after dark, he’d sit with Frank by the light of the fire and the hurricane lanterns, and they’d talk for a little, until they petered out into a companionable silence punctuated by pops from the driftwood burning on the hearth.

It couldn’t last, of course. The power plant wasn’t going to repair itself, and the supplies of food were dwindling. Frank was still hacking a lung up every time Phil turned his back, and that shoulder had taken up nearly the entirety of Phil’s stock of bandages. 

“I've got the motor working on the runabout,” he said that evening as they sat with Lucky at their feet, his tail thumping on Frank’s bare toes and his head pillowed on Phil’s slippers. “We could go over to LBI tomorrow, pick up some groceries and take you to the doctor.” He’d meant it to be as innocent and benign a proposal as possible; just a doctor, no hospital. Completely innocuous.

Frank froze. 

“I’m doing better,” he whispered, then closed his lips against a cough. 

“Mostly,” Phil amended for him.

“I’m mostly doing better. Give me a little time. I really don’t need a doc. I can go, if you need-- if that’s what you’re worried about. Should I go? Look, just drop me off anywhere on the island and I’ll get out of your hair.” He was trying to hide his panic, and his coughs, and he generally looked so pathetic that Lucky sat up and gave his hand a lick.

“Do you have a phobia about doctors?”

“No, I… kinda? I don’t much appreciate spending time in med… ical offices. I just… I can’t pay.”

“I can.”

“You’ve already--” Phil waved off the start of that particular excuse.

“Don’t even start with ‘you’ve already done so much'; I don’t want you dying on me because we missed the start of pneumonia, is all.”

“If I promise not to die on you, can I just stay here?” Frank meant it to come out joking, clearly, but there was something lurking in the back of his eyes, in the sudden tension in his shoulders. Lucky growled as his hand tightened in the fur. Phil eyed him for a long moment.

It wasn’t as if it was news to him that Frank was hiding something. The reason for the bullet wound, certainly. He'd asked. Once. And gotten a blunt "I won't talk about it; throw me out or don't" in return. (Then he'd had a coughing fit and Phil hadn't even replied, just rolled his eyes and brought something for him to heave into.) But the unacknowledged forbidden zone had extended vague tentacles away from the accident and into whichever area in Frank’s past suddenly seemed to be a topic of conversation.

When the word had come over shortwave that the bridge from LBI to the shore was open again, Phil hadn’t missed the way Frank had disappeared into a dune for the afternoon. 

“Yes, fine,” he said slowly, in reply to Frank's plea, and watched Frank sink back into the couch and stroke Lucky gently, as if in penance. “But at the first sign it’s getting worse? In you go.”

“Okay.”

It wasn't a sustainable state of affairs, this not-knowing, and could quickly border on the dangerous for them both. Still. Phil glanced over at Frank, who was slowly releasing the tension that had coiled in him, and tried not to examine too closely the reasons he wasn't pushing.

**Two**

“Are you sure that’s going to be enough?” 

Phil looked down at the boxes of sterile gauze that were threatening to fall off the mountain of bandaging in his arms. 

“Lucky’s not that big a dog,” he said, and looked back up at Doc Halliday with an amused grin. “And it wasn’t a big stick. This will be fine.” It would also be fine for a large man with a bullet wound in his shoulder, Phil didn’t say. 

Doc Halliday had been worrying about Lucky ever since the rainy night she’d stitched up his eye, splinted his front leg, and hefted him in her own two spindly arms to take him back to the kennel for observation. Phil had slept in her guest bedroom that night tossing and turning on the little bed with its white lace coverlet. The guest bedroom was on the same wall as the kennel below, and he found himself waking up every time that damned shih tzu who had a rotten stomach would start yipping. 

Lauren Halliday, on the other hand, had not woken up once, largely because she’d been down in the kennels with the shih tzu, and Lucky, and a maine coon with a popped cyst that had gone toxic. 

That had been several years ago, now, but invoking Lucky’s name could still get Doc Halliday out of bed in the middle of the night.

Phil hadn’t tried that; it was, in fact, late afternoon. The vet’s office had closed fifteen minutes previously, after a busy day tending to minor injuries canine, feline, avian, and porcine. (Phil’d seen the pot-bellied pig limping out with its owner as he came in.) He’d felt bad about his own tale of woe: Lucky down with a puncture from a badly-placed stick, while helping him during the storm. No stitches needed, but he was short on bandages, and could she maybe spare some gauze? She could, and antibiotics as well, and was he sure she shouldn’t do a house call? No? How about some coffee?

Coffee was Folgers, and weak at that, served in little pink rose porcelain cups on her porch, but Phil never said no. Doc Halliday had been veterinarian at Gansett Light since God was a child, and her whitewashed porch was a reliable center of gossip, served with butter cookies and good grace. 

Meeting her had been like falling under an avalanche for him. From being mostly-reclusive in his little island, coming over once every couple weeks for supplies and/or scientists, Phil had been dragged first into the volunteer fire brigade, then the search and rescue team, then the Long Beach Island Shoreline Preservation Society. She was a tiny blue-haired whirlwind of good intentions, and whether she’d decided that company would be good for the frantic dog-rescuer who’d shown up on her door at nearly midnight, or that he’d be good for company, either way she was not to be denied.

“I’m just glad to know I wasn’t missing any calls; apart from the shortwave everything was out, and that was coming in badly,” he’d told her earlier, sitting in the same creaky wicker chair he always did. “I was worried we’d get called out for some idiot who wouldn’t put into shore.”

“Well, no, and even Emily from the Coast Guard says they had less trouble than expected. That’s nice, isn’t it? I don’t know if everyone is still nervous from Sandy, or there are just fewer of us to get into trouble, but it’s good to have a quiet storm for once.”

“Yes? Good. I have a lot to clean up on North Bar; lots of big debris washed up, and the beach is a mess down where the salt marsh comes in by the research bunkers.” She nodded, and paused.

“Are you supposed to have anyone from the labs coming to stay there soon?” she asked, stirring her coffee, and Phil cocked an eyebrow at her.

“No. Why? Idle curiosity?” 

A shrug. It was a most un-Halliday gesture, as was her little dissatisfied sigh.

“There were people here, just after the storm, when we were still trying to clean up-- how they got here, heavens knows!-- asking questions.”

“Questions?” Phil bit back the desire to follow that up with a sharp “what kind? about whom?” He’d underestimated the acuity of her mind exactly once in the years he’d known her, and he’d paid for that with a brief stint as fundraising chair of the Preservation Society.

“Have we had any boating accidents lately? Has anyone come into our offices asking to be patched up? Those are the direct questions. There are indirect ones too.” She looked up. “Been a long time since we last had a fugitive here, if it’s true,” she said, and Phil would have sworn her eyes were twinkling.

“Huh,” he grunted. “I never knew you had a romantic bone in that tough old body of yours, Doc.”

“‘Romantic’ my rear end, Phillip Coulson. It wouldn’t be romantic, and you know it. The last one was really pathetic-- mentally ill, I think, poor thing. Tried to hide out behind Mansky’s old surf shop, you know. Something about a bar fight, might have been a falling-out with someone who owed them money. But! Hope springs eternal.”

“What for? A good story?”

“Oh yes, exactly! You snort if you want, Phil, but a good story is worth going well out of your way for.”

So Phil had gotten his gossip, and his bandages (and antibiotics, and probably could have gotten morphine except Frank seemed to have a violent dislike of anything stronger than extra-strength ibuprofen), and he left shedding boxes from his arms and sloshing coffee in his insides. He felt unbalanced, like walking on sparsely-planted sand dune. 

He thought of Frank, head thrown back as he napped in the dune next to Phil’s front door, and wondered just what it was the storm had brought him.

**Three**

After the hip-hop crab grinning over the door of the last bar she’d tried, the powder blue-and-cream shingling of the Blue Peter had come as a bit of a relief. Still, Skye’d eyed the flyers tacked up in the clear pane next to the door with a wary eye. The specials weren’t anything special, the draft beer list was remarkable chiefly for the fact that someone had bothered to post it, and the band playing Friday night was yet another generic Soul Classics cover operation.

Yelp! and LBIfoodies! both assured everyone that the oil pans were generous and the seafood fresh (it better be-- the Blue Peter had a deck built out over the water) and that the pot pies alone were worth coming for. That was why Skye had bothered to go inside; any place that had pot pies “to die for” was probably a halfway decent place to work.

That had been three days ago, and within an hour she’d already acquired a job, a first shift, and the first meal she’d had in weeks that hadn’t been eaten in the driver’s seat of her van. Her feet already ached and her arm and shoulder muscles weren’t thanking her either-- it turned out the Blue Peter was in need of help because it was one of the few places that was nearly as crowded off-season as on, and all its summer staff had gone back to school.

It wasn’t the oil pans or even the pot-pies that made the Blue Peter a community hub. It was that Tom, big, soft, doughy Tom her new boss, was constitutionally incapable of not making friends with anyone who walked in the door.

So they all stayed.

And when she had walked through the door, exhausted from hitting nearly every damn place on the strip only to find that with the vacationers gone home for the season there were few jobs open, she’d been made friends with and added to his collection. It was a hell of a break for someone without much work history (much real work history-- the fake one was fucking excellent) who’d just kind of drifted in on the tails of Fred.

She’d spent as much time being introduced around as waitressing, her first shift. 

As she made the rounds of the empty tables, re-setting ketchup, vinegar and hot sauce bottles in their ill-matched assortment of tin buckets, she revelled in the relative peace. The silence was broken only by the slightly congested hum of the HVAC system, the swish of ceiling fan blades, and the low background murmur of her new boss’s chatter. It was divided between aimless gossip and stuff she actually needed to know for her job, and she was trying-- she really was-- to pay attention. What she wanted was to go back to her van, parked in a mostly-empty side street, collapse on her cot, and sleep. 

Instead, she smiled her best smile and assured Tom that she could figure out how to work the fancy new checkout system on the StarkTablet just fine, no really, she’d used ‘em before. 

Tom nodded, looking a little less like a forlorn St. Bernard, and was about to move on to something equally enthralling when the door jingled and opened. Skye blinked, because she was pretty sure she’d seen the man who was walking into the gloom of the underlit- entryway before-- as a model on a fishsticks box. He had the beard, the cabled sweater, the general air of misplaced enthusiasm, the slicker, everything.

“Phil,” Tom said, nodding at the guy.

“Tom.”

Skye waited, but neither of them said anything more for a long moment, until Phil turned and put down the load of boxes in his arm.

“Beer?” Tom asked him then, and Phil nodded and sidled up to the bar. Skye wasn’t actually sure the Blue Peter was _open_ yet but that seemed to bother neither of them. 

Whatever errand had brought Phil to the bar, Skye was too far away to hear, since she’d ended up deep under a booth in the corner, picking scattered sweetener packets up off the floor. By the time she was done with that and her circuit had taken her back near the bar, they’d wound down, and were failing to talk, in that peculiar way men in old cowboy movies had of failing to talk while somehow bonding anyway.

“Skye, this is Phil Coulson. Skye’s on her second shift here, Phil. Phil’s Keeper of North Bar, Skye,” Tom said, waving vaguely at them both as he performed the ritual introductions. Skye put on her best smile and held out her hand, trying not to seem either eager or predatory.

“That sounds like something out of Game of Thrones,” she said instead, and Phil blinked back at her.

“Ah, I guess?” He looked to Tom for support, and Tom shrugged. “I haven’t really read them.” His smile, behind that beard, was both rueful and kind of faintly mocking. Skye realized she was twisting the bar rag in her hands, and tried to return it.

“Really? Living under a rock for a decade or something?” she teased, and was startled when his smile widened and he ducked his head, like he wasn’t some damned old-timey cliche islander.

“That’s an accurate description of life on North Bar, yes,” he said. “And you? What brings you to LBI in exactly the wrong season?”

“Oh,” Skye shifted, “stuff and things. Got restless, I guess. Decided LA in the summer sucked, thought I’d just take my van and point it somewhere and go ‘till I had to stop.” She shrugged and met his eyes. “Turns out this is where I stopped.”

Well, it wasn’t precisely untrue, anyway. If you left out the part where her van doubled as her home and tripled as the base from which she’d hacked into more than a dozen high-profile corporate or government targets. (Okay, with some assistance from her Rising Tide compatriots.)

Well, and if “point it somewhere to go” meant “chasing ghosts in cyberspace until they led her to the Jersey shore.”

“So, North Bar,” she continued before he could respond, “that’s where, like, they did all that secret research back in World War II? That’s pretty cool.” 

“I guess,” Phil said again, and scratched thoughtfully at his beard. “There’s not a lot left from that era; what the sea hasn’t taken care of, I’ve had to. It turns out scientists tend to object when you leave the detritus of the previous research group around.”

“But the mansion’s still got a lot of the old furniture and albums and things,” Tom interjected, and Skye beamed her gratitude at him. “It’s fascinating. Phil takes people around once in a while, kind of like a tour.”

“Not that often,” Phil started, but Tom waved that away.

“Once a year at least, for friends anyway.”

“That sounds _really_ neat.” Skye turned her best eyelash-bat on the man, and wriggled her body into _fascinated_ mode. “Like, are there old stories about the family and everything? Or ghosts? I’d love to see it!”

“No ghosts, just me and sometimes a bunch of researchers down from New York. But,” Phil said, setting his empty glass on the bar and standing up, “Fred hit the island pretty hard, there’s too much for me to do at the moment to be herding visitors. Speaking of, I better get back, Tom. I'll see you next Tuesday as usual.” 

Tom took his cue and handed over a set of white waxed boxes stamped with a series of signal flags on the cover. The flags varied from box to box; Tom’d told her they spelled out the variety of pot pie contained within, but for all Skye knew they could be saying anything from “beef” to “engage the enemy more closely.” Even while she was eyeing them, Phil had swept them into his arms, taken a very efficient sort of leave, and tidied himself out the door.

“Well hey,” Skye said after a long moment, “it’s not every day I meet a real live hermit.” 

Tom tilted his head back and laughed.

“Yeah, a real life hermit who sits on the library board and goes out on SAR missions. Phil’s about the only one who really believes he’s that much of a loner, anymore.” 

“Oh yeah?” Skye grabbed a convenient rag and started polishing the bar and wiping down the vinegar bottles on it, hoping to keep Tom in his expansive mood. “Why’s he so invested in it? That gruff loner thing bring in chicks or something?”

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Tom shook his head. “And if it did, I think he’d do it less.”

“It bring in the guys, then?” Skye asked, flipping the rag over her shoulder and beginning to re-set barstools.

“Not so much of them either.” Oh for heaven’s sake, you usually couldn’t get Tom to _stop_ gossiping. 

“What about a tragic past then? Big beard, cabled sweater, I could see it. The kind of guy who gave his love to the sea after his lover left him?” She leaned against the back of a barstool and tried to look discreetly interested-- not hard, really.

“Died,” Tom said, frowning. Not at her, she didn’t think. “Someone he met while he was in the Rangers, or so I’m told.” 

“Oh, hey, bonus! That was gonna be my next guess-- that he was some kind of soldier who’s trying to leave the war far behind. Both, huh? Nice.”

“Phil’s a good man, Skye. Maybe he mopes a bit, but we’d have been hard done by after Sandy, up here on Gansett Light, without him. Just because we didn’t have the entire township wiped out, people didn’t seem to think we needed the same kind of help that mid-island got. Phil made sure we didn’t get overlooked.”

“Hey, I’m sure he is! I’m glad he is.” Skye held up her hands to ward off the very thought she might have implied otherwise. “I just find it… romantic, I guess. And you’ve got to admit, that is a tragic beard if you ever saw one. You don’t wear that kind of beard unless you’ve got trauma.”

Tom’s snort was definitely one of agreement, and Skye relaxed.

So, the Keeper of North Bar was an ex-Army Ranger who hated visitors. Fuck, that was going to make getting on the island even more of a dodgy prospect. And since that morning she had finally, _finally_ managed to find the hardware profile she was looking for, and when she ran a location search on it, the satellites kept insisting it was on the small dune-covered island to the west of Gansett Light, in Barnegat Bay, she was going to need to find a way to wrangle an invite. She had work to do, damnit. 

Also, ketchup bottles to fill, apparently, if Tom’s scowl was any indication.

**Four**

Clint had to sit down on the sheet-bedecked furniture and pant for a long while after he let himself into the old mansion. The stairway up to the high gabled porch was long. The house’s first story was six feet above the ground, clearly built with the sea in mind. It took the last of his remaining strength to climb up, pulling himself up along the rail and closing his lips tightly against the gasps that threatened to break loose. He felt like the marks of the salt water would never entirely leave his lungs, would eat away at them until they collapsed, undermined from within. Still, he couldn’t let that stop him anymore.

Living in Phil’s weathered cottage, tucked onto his big leather couch and toasting in front of the fire at nights while Phil shuffled comfortingly in the armchair, was a little like living in a fiction. Which had described his entire life, really. Orphan, runaway, circus star, thief, soldier, spy, superhero-- by this point it shouldn’t have been a real shock to add “castaway” to his long list of improbable roles. What Clint wasn’t sure about was what role Phil Coulson had in all of this.

The man had steadfastly refused to be curious about him. Well, no. He’d steadfastly refused to _act_ on his curiosity about Clint. And since Clint had seen no indication whatsoever that Phil was either unimaginitive or self-centered, it either meant that Phil already knew as much as he’d decided he needed to know, or he had some agenda of his own. 

This was the conclusion Clint had come to reluctantly after Phil had gone out to get the runabout and motor over to Long Beach Island for bandages and groceries. His absence seemed to clear Clint’s head just a little further, or else that was the way the day’s exercise had tingled its way along his limbs, bringing him fully alive for the first time since he’d fallen into the ocean.

It had to have been the loss of blood, or the hit to the head or the water to the lungs, that had made everything to do with Phil seem so easy, like both of them were moving in the same direction with the same purpose, from that first assisted piss on. 

Or maybe it was just nice not to be recognized, for once. Not to have someone reacting to Hawkeye the Avenger, or Clint Barton the ex-SHIELD agent. The assassin. Maybe this was the benefit of being Frank Barney; that the Phils of the world (the Phil of the world-- surely there couldn’t be more than one gruff-bearded uber-patient chicken-tending hottie out there rescuing half-drowned strangers and feeding them soup) were at ease around them. It was a little disconcerting to feel so relaxed in someone’s presence so quickly. 

And then there was that morning. It had finally been truly sunny, the light pale and sweet the way it could get when trying to make up for its behavior during bad weather. Clint had padded after Phil as he did his morning rounds up the small slope to the center of North Bar, trailing him like Lucky often did. Phil stopped every so often to look in scrub for the still-missing chickens-- usually about the time that Clint was beginning to feel winded.

Nothing on North Bar was really elevated, but what little mound there was held an old mansion, gabled and elegant, long cream porches wrapping around the pale green siding, windows open to the sunrise. The old owners had probably just considered it a beach house, barely large enough to hold a family, their servants, and a half dozen guests. He imagined the procession of the years in the passage of men and women across the balconies, in and out the doors, skirts shortening and hair morphing and cocktails changing but their motions remaining the same.

Only the lower two floors were kept open since “the family” (as Phil called them) had largely abandoned it. The big old building had suffered a little during Fred, and at the moment Phil was still cataloguing damage. The blown windows would have to be shipped in, but he could repair the sections of roof easily enough. 

The lower floors stayed open because they housed the scientists that sometimes stayed on the island as they worked on the hydroelectric power plant and the buoy farm offshore, which fed it. Phil had mentioned their existence, but been vague about them otherwise, and Clint didn’t press. It was one thing to trust Frank Barney with his chickens, another to trust him with the confidential aspects of his job. Clint could hardly complain about the lack of transparency, all things considered. 

They hadn’t had time to go inside before Phil had to leave for Long Beach Island, but when he left, he pressed the key into Clint’s hand and asked him to come back up and check for water damage inside, if he and Lucky were up for the walk that afternoon. Clint had stood a long moment as Phil began his walk back to the mansion, staring from Phil to the key in his hand, and back.

There was no way, simply no way that someone would trust him that much without an agenda. Not even a self-described hermit of a decade and a half. And if Clint hoped to discover anything about Phil’s agenda, the mansion seemed as good a place to start as any. If he knew what exactly it was that went on at North Bar, it might help him get a handle on his improbable rescuer.

Clint stepped out of the hallway into the first open door, a breakfast parlor filled with shrouded furniture, rolled-up rugs, and a white-mantled fireplace along one wall. It couldn’t hurt to make a start at the task Phil had asked of him. He frowned up at a dark patch on the figured wallpaper and tried to decide whether it was caused by water damage, or just a damaged interior decorator.

When he turned around, a glint of light on wall next to the little fireplace caught his eye, and he wandered over. Most of the walls were bare, more vibrant in spots, left over ghosts of where pictures had once hung. This one exception hung slightly lopsided over the mantel, as if everyone had left the room in such a hurry it had blown the picture off level. It was a family shot; a more-than-middle-aged man suave in his moustache, his wife beside him nestled in furs, and a small saturnine child standing between them and pouting. They stood in front of an old convertible, chrome gleaming, rockets boosting it a few inches off the ground.

Clint instinctively pulled back from the picture; the child seemed to be either daring him or disapproving of him. _How slow can you be?_ the kid asked him from the photo.

And then he moved closer and pulled the photograph off the wall to stare at it. He knew that face. He _knew_ it, and the faces of both the child’s parents. His lungs burned, and a tide of nausea welled up in his stomach. He flipped the photo over, to find a little label pasted on the back.

“Howard and Maria Stark, and son Anthony Stark, outside Stark Mansion, New York, with a prototype.”

Clint set the wire carefully back on its nail, and pushed it until it hung at the same skew it had been at for-- years, probably. 

Tony Stark. _His_ Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, aka head of Stark Industries, aka Jerk Who Never Refills the Coffee Pot. Co-leader of the Avengers, with Steve Rogers. (And Pepper Potts, really. And Nick Fury, sort of. Avengers leadership was a fraught topic.) 

Stark owned North Bar. In fleeing his old team, Clint had washed up in the last place he should be. 

Or else the last place anyone would think to look for him.

Which it would turn out to be depended mostly on Phil.

A thump on the door interrupted his reverie, and Clint instinctively crouched behind a large settle. Another thump, a knocking… and then, just when Clint thought he might move again, the door creaked open and an elongated shadow appeared in the hall.

And Clint would think later about the fact that he knew instinctively the shadow wasn’t Phil, didn’t move like Phil or sound like Phil or look like Phil. 

He’d think about that later, because just at that moment he couldn’t think of anyone _but_ Phil who should be showing up in the doorway.

Clint braced himself, and waited.

___

_To be continued...._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on Washed Ashore: Will Clint be discovered? Is Hawkeye pregnant? And we round out our main cast as Kate Bishop shows up on the island-- but why is she there, and why was she followed?


	3. Flying False Colors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Clint’s playing hide-and-seek with an intruder on the island, Phil’s learning that Hawkeye might be pregnant or a girl, and Skye meets two new arrivals from New York-- who promptly upend life at the Blue Peter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not an mpreg fic.
> 
> And that is a sentence I just actually wrote.

**One**

“Hello?” said the shadow striping the hallway, and Clint stopped breathing. “Hello, anybody? I need help with my boat?” 

After a moment, the shadow moved forward on the faded paisley carpet, and the feet it was attached to revealed themselves, and then the rest of the unexpected visitor.

He was a classic tall dark and brooding, with cheekbones that could have cut glass, a little bulkier than a civilian was likely be, and he walked with a quiet rolled-step gait that had Clint shrinking even further back into concealment.

“Anybody home?” he called once more, framed in the wide oak archway that led from hall to parlor, then looked around and muttered “good.” 

That was when Clint recognized him. Or, rather, when Clint recognized that he _should_ recognize him, he just couldn’t for the life of him remember from where. He’d seen the man’s type before, though, often enough that the familiarity was chilling.

The man dropped his backpack, and any pretense of being lost, and began a thorough search of the hallway, poking his head in each door--clearly cataloging-- and pulling up the furniture covers. 

Well this was going to be a problem, then.

A long wedge of sunlight still streaming from the open door, marking his best exit route. But between it and Clint was an entire room with a large archway for an entrance and not nearly enough furniture to comfortably sneak behind. An identical archway opened on the other side of the hall, and the man stopped between the two doors.

 _Turn right,_ Clint tried to project at him, lips pursing and eyebrows curling with the force of the thought. _Turn right. Turn right._

The man hesitated, then looked behind him. After a moment, he strode back over to the doorway, looked out and around the porch-- and closed the goddamned door when he came back in. And of course there was nothing around for Clint to hit him with, which just at the moment he sorely wanted to do. The man hesitated again, and Clint beamed one last _Right!_ at him.

He turned left.

As the man entered the empty afternoon parlor and disappeared from view for a moment, Clint chuckled sadly to himself. _Still got the touch, anyway._

It had started as a joke, during one particularly bad mission with Nat, when they’d been spotted while sneaking out of a secret facility, and ended up having to blow the place to bits using just the items accessible to them in a supply closet:

_All we needed was for him to take the staircase! We would have been clean away. Why the hell do the bad guys never do what I want them to? Nat, why?_

_I don’t know, Barton, why don’t you try reverse psychology on them?_

Yeah, reverse psychology on your own luck. Thanks, Natasha, always so helpful. But it had _worked._ And then it worked again. And then again-- and eventually enough times that it had become habit, or a superstition.

It had sent Jawbones off into the vacant room, but Clint’s luck was even fickler than the usual brand. He already had it stretched tight as a drum, he didn’t think he could manage to push his luck all the way to _Come find me, Jawbones, I’m over here!_. 

Jawbones, meanwhile, was beginning to inch back into sight in the other room, nicely-rounded butt first. He was bent over and checking under the shrouded sofa for… well, there was no telling what. Possibly a thing, but equally possibly a person. Possibly a Clint Barton, in fact.

Past time to be gone, then. 

Clint took a deep breath to steady himself, and tried not to cough as he inhaled the musty scent of old upholstery. His crawl behind the settle was cramped, and the angle awkward when he peeked out around the side. Jawbones was still visible in the other room, standing up this time, running his hands along the wood paneling. _Looking for secret doors, eh?_ Clint thought, as he crept over the brick hearth. Jawbones began to turn, and Clint leapt.

He ended up squished in the shadow of an ornate china cabinet, out of line of sight. He froze.

Jawbones froze, too. Clint could _feel_ it.

Clint waited in the blind spot behind the cabinet until he heard a distinct bang in the afternoon parlor, and then he ran for the archway, flattening himself next to it and peering around to peek out.

Jawbones was out of line-of-sight, but he could still hear muffled sounds coming from the afternoon parlor, like a particularly large and annoying squirrel in the walls. He wasn’t bothering with anything remotely approaching subtle anymore. The guy couldn’t have _that_ much more to check, Clint thought. He glanced at the door. 

Clint wasn’t gonna be able to make the door, and even if he did, there was no way he was gonna be able to open and close it without Jawbones hearing him. The hinges hadn’t been oiled in far too long. Only one option, then.

The bannister of the long, open staircase gleamed red in the afternoon light, and the stairs, carpeted in mauve brocade, climbed the side of the afternoon parlor’s wall, to an initial landing big enough for an entire rosewood credenza. They bent and climbed again after that, and unless Clint was mistaken, one of the broken windows was just opposite the stairs at the top, and opened onto a long slope to the roof.

Clint gulped, and willed his lungs to cooperate. 

_Oh please let him see me,_ he muttered, and then padded out into the hall. 

Jawbones was shoulders-deep in the built-in cabinets on the far side of the afternoon parlor, which had been disguised to look like the rest of the wall panels. So he _had_ found a secret door after all. Too bad it just housed a wet bar. As he watched, Jawbones began to withdraw.

Clint did the same, right up the stairs, fighting the urge to go _faster faster faster faster_. Forcing himself to roll his feet onto each threadbare tread to avoid creaks. The distance from base to landing seemed endless. When he made it, he turned back to look once. 

There was a shadow in the doorway.

Clint made it up the rest of the steps a lot faster and-- a whole lot sloppier. Luck was, for once in his damned life, on his side, even without trickery, and he reached the top safely. 

Now, to cross to the window, pull out the boarding and-- _goddamnit, Phil._ The man had nailed on the plywood covering the window with densely-spaced finishing nails, evenly set in neat rows on all four edges. What the hell kind of perfectionist even did that?

Clint whined, to himself, then swallowed when the vocalization nearly choked him; he hadn’t realized how dry his throat had become. A coughing fit was the last thing he needed.

 _Time to blow this popsicle stand._

A short search uncovered the existence of an undamaged window in the bedroom to his right; an airy, white-painted room with an overly-elaborate canopy bed. Clint crossed his fingers together as he slid them across the sash, and his unreliable luck had clearly decided to go back to work. No fine nail-work this time, just a dowel to keep the window from being raised. He pulled that out, looked around for a place to leave it, and found none. Shrugging, he laid it on the top of the sash and stilled it, hoping it would balance there long enough for him to be out and gone, anyway.

The stairs creaked just as Clint was realizing the window was stuck. He paused, waiting.

They creaked again.

Adrenaline hit with the force of a freight train, and the window gave to a last, frantic, push. The dowel rattled above the frame but didn’t fall. Clint was through before he’d quite registered he’d begun the dive. He had the window closed and himself plastered against the front paneling of the house, feet braced against the torn-up shingling, in a very satisfactory few seconds. 

Jawbones appeared at the window, staring out, hands hesitating over the sash. Clint felt his eyes go wide as saucers, because if Jawbones turned left….

The window creaked as Jawbones started to push it open, and Clint started to rebalance, calculating how fast he’d have to grab the guy by the neck, to have a chance of toppling him off the roof as he came through. Jawbones heaved once, twice-- and at least the window really did suck that badly, it wasn’t Clint’s weakened state-- and then the dowel rolled off the sash, rapping him on the head as it went, and Jawbones flung his arms over his neck, clearly cursing.

Clint bit back a manic giggle as Jawbones picked the dowel up and glared at it. He looked back up out the window, and paused, and so did Clint. 

After a moment, he saw the guy shake his head and turn away.

As soon as he did, Clint flung himself off the roof.

He _did_ manage to grab a pillar on the way down. It was a _controlled_ fall; Clint was practically the Emperor of controlled falls. It’d have taken a drop of at least another two stories before he started to worry.

Anyway, the junipers he landed in were fairly soft, and his head thumped onto a furry, warm pillow of dog.

Which was not part of the plan.

“Aw, dog, no,” Clint whispered when he’d righted himself and gotten his hands on Lucky, who was lying in a dirty-furred heap next to the base of one of the larger bushes. Clint put his ear to Lucky’s chest, biting his lip and praying he’d feel a heave from the dog’s ribs or a kick from his rear paw.

The shallow rise and fall from Lucky’s chest assured him that the mutt was just tranq’ed, not dead. 

Still.

He was going to shatter Jawbone’s most prominent feature for him, just for hurting Lucky. 

Speaking of Jawbones; Clint was by no means safe yet. There wasn’t necessarily a lot of room to hide on a trip back to the cottage, and Clint needed to get there badly. His body was telling him in a loud voice, with several visual aids and accompanying hand gestures, that he was _not_ recovered enough for this kind of shit. And now he needed to sneak home while dragging an unconscious dog. And hope Jawbones didn’t notice the dog was gone.

And that Jawbones didn’t have cronies.

Or Clint could wait here until dark, he guessed, and hope Jawbones didn’t notice him in the shrubbery when he left.

It was just as Clint was trying to decide if he could find a thicker section of bush that the front door started to creak open. 

**Two**

“Well _I_ don’t know, do I, Wanda?”

Phil squeezed his eyes shut and sighed. It was already getting late, and he was going to miss his tide. (Not that it would make a huge difference in the runabout, except for increasing the distance he had to lower supplies into the boat by a few feet.) If he was honest with himself, he was worried about his chickens and his dog and his castaway, and how they were doing on their own. 

Especially the castaway. The chickens would recover or not; he’d already splinted the broken leg and wing, and bandaged the wounds of the others. The dog could largely take care of himself. But it was the first time he’d left Frank on the island, and he wasn’t convinced that the man wouldn’t either try to overexert himself and end up collapsed somewhere, or take it on the lam in the skiff-- which would result in the same thing. _Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to repair it. Hard to run in a hole-y skiff._

The runabout was nearly fully-loaded after his trips, with everything he’d need for his various charges: shingles for the mansion, spar varnish for the runabout, bandages for the castaway, permethrin to treat the chickens for mites. All that was left was groceries and the 20-lb bag of kibble for Lucky. These were in his cart and he’d already rounded the corner of the last aisle in Tudeskei’s Market, so there was no hiding from Des Tudeski, nor his favorite partner-in-gossip, Wanda Jackson. They loomed over the checkout lane like guards before a gate (guards in gaudy floral prints, in both cases), and God knew he wasn’t getting out of here now within the next half-hour.

“Coulson!” Wanda roared in greeting, and Phil bit back a sigh. Sure enough. “Heard the latest?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” he said, and greeted Des with a nod. Wanda laughed at him and leaned on the conveyor belt as Phil was attempting to put potatoes onto it. She shifted over genially enough as she started talking.

“They opened up the Trashcan, you know. And after barely being here at all this summer, too. Booker’s been up there putting the grounds into shape and Thelma and Louise were charging double-rate to get it cleaned up in time.”

“Well, Bishop can afford it,” Phil said mildly, and Des snorted with laughter-- right into the bag of brussels sprouts he was ringing up at the time, unfortunately. Phil half-turned as a young woman sidled up behind him with a bag of bread and a jar of peanut butter in her arms. She met his eyes briefly then turned away with a huff, tossing a cloud of dark curls over her shoulder and fingering the gum.

“It’s not him, though. Louise--” by which Wanda meant “Louie,” who’d never once had his name pronounced correctly since he and Thelma Ransom had gone into business together-- “says he’s sending his daughter down, with some aunt or cousin or shirt-tail relative like that. Very sudden, and no one knows why. It’s practically Downtown Abbey. I wonder what she did to get exiled to the country house?”

“Oh, come on, Wanda, no one does that anymore,” Des shook a bunch of leeks at her for emphasis as he bagged them. “Do they, Phil?” Behind him, the girl shifted from foot to foot, and the edge of her jean jacket brushed at his back. He shifted forward a half-step, trying not to tense up.

“Ah,” he said, “no idea. Sorry. A bit out of touch.” This made Wanda snort.

“No one believes your hermit act anymore, Phil,” she said. “This is nearly the longest it’s been that we haven’t seen you ‘round, since Sandy.” 

Des perked up at that, and rounded on Phil, asking:

“Did North Bar come through Fred okay? You didn’t say anything--”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s fine, Des, or you wouldn’t see Phil mooning about buying yogurt,” Wanda waved him off. “No, you’re not distracting me. I want to know why Kate Bishop’s in town. It’s either drugs or she’s knocked up.”

“Oh come _on_ Wanda, not everything is a soap opera. Maybe she just wants a change of scenery.” Des flung a brick of cheese into the grocery bag with extra vigor. Phil hoped it hadn’t hit the coffeecake (he didn’t normally indulge in breakfast pastries, but maybe Frank would eat a bit more in mornings if there were something sweet and flaky around). 

“Fat chance. No teenager wants to be someplace as boring as Gansett Light in the offseason. No one to party with but us old farts and hermits like Phil here.” Wanda shook her finger at both of them impartially. “And you don’t send a goddamn maiden auntie with unless you don’t trust the kid not to get into trouble alone.”

“To be fair, I wouldn’t trust any ninteen-year-old not to get into trouble if they were all alone down here. Right, Phil?”

Phil shrugged and tried not to look at the girl behind him, who couldn’t be much more than that. She’d gone still, as near as he could tell, and he wondered briefly what was on her face. 

“I used to trust them with RPGs,” he said mildly. It wasn’t fair. He knew the comparison was wildly out of line, but the silence following it, and the subdued snort from the girl at his back, was _well_ worth the tortured logic. He began to think he might get out after all without the destruction of all his groceries.

“Speaking of getting knocked up,” Des said after a long moment, and stabbed one hairy-knuckled finger back at a tabloid hanging in the wire rack next to the register. “You seen the latest from the Weekly World?” He pulled it out and shoved it at Wanda. She cackled, and handed it to Phil.

The photo was grainy, from a distance, and showed a guy in a hoodie and Ray-Bans, his scowl likely wilting any vegetation within a thousand-yard radius. The hoodie was tight across his considerable shoulders, baggier at the waist.

 _Is Hawkeye Pregnant?_ screamed the headline. The subhead whispered: _Avengers disappearance due to baby bump?_

“What the hell is this?” he asked, handing it back. For answer, Des waved his hand over the other tabloids in the line. _Hawkeye a Traitor? Archer Last Seen On Plane to North Korea_ (A distance shot of a sandy-haired man in line at LaGuardia), _Hawkeye Feared Dead After Two Weeks Missing_ (a mosaic of action and paparazzi shots), _Aliens Did It!: Sources Confirm Avenger Abducted_ (the same grainy stock photo of a light in the sky as always, with an inset of yet another blurry action shot of the superhero). _Hawkeye Has a Sex Change! Archerette Spotted at Met Gala_ (a blurry action shot of a figure in a purple dress holding a bow, her shoulders entirely too slender to have ever belonged to a man). 

“I’m waiting for someone to put it all together in one big mess,” Wanda leered. “Hawkeye disappeared because he had a sex change and got pregnant with an alien baby who was selling it to the North Koreans.”

“The alien baby was selling secrets?” Phil asked.

“No, dummy, Hawkeye.”

“Can you even get a plane to North Korea from LaGuardia?” Des wondered. The girl was getting restless, Phil could tell. The shifting had begun again, and he thought he could feel eyes being rolled. He glanced back to give her a rueful smile, but she was looking past him at the tabloids, as if trying to read over his shoulder.

“Not easily,” Phil muttered. “So, what does the slightly-less-disreputable press say?” Des set the New York Times in front of him and turned to A14. (Des had clearly been keeping up.) Phil skimmed quickly, long enough to learn that Hawkeye hadn’t been seen for three weeks, despite the fact that the Avengers had been called out several times. In addition, sources high up in an unnamed government agency had been searching for Clint Barton-- the man’s real name, though no one used it much-- for weeks. There were unconfirmed sightings in Prague, Budapest, Sydney, Brooklyn, and Atlantic City. No comment from Captain America _or_ Tony Stark (which was probably a first). No comment from anyone at SHIELD, or in the White House. The course of the investigation, though… wasn’t promising. You never want to see harbors being dredged. 

Phil realized he’d been staring at the publicity shot of Hawkeye, sunglasses covering most of his face, firm jaw scowling as always, for too long. Des was waiting for him, watching. Phil took another look at that jaw, then looked back up. 

“Well, hell,” he said. Des and Wanda nodded, and Wanda turned the paper towards herself.

“They said he was out in the Rockaways, during Sandy,” she said, her voice soft. Wanda’d gossip about her own mother if given half an opportunity, but riding out Sandy in the Rockaways meant he was closer kin than that: storm-kin. Wanda’s own home might have cost two of anything out there, it didn’t matter. She’d lost it just the same. The affinity of experience clearly earned him at least a few moments of regret, in her book. Phil frowned down at the face, fingers tracing lightly along the man’s shoulders.

“It’d be a damn shame to lose a superhero some kinda stupid way like that,” Des said. “Like, I could see mad scientist. Or demons, or aliens. The guy took on the fucking Chitauri with a fucking bow and arrow. What kinda way to die is drowning?”

“Dead is dead,” Phil said. “Let’s hope he’s not.” The girl behind him placed her loaf and her jar on the conveyor belt and reached over him for a pack of gum. He caught sight of her t-shirt as she stretched; a white star on a blue ground. Like Captain America had worn during the brief time he’d been Commander Rogers of SHIELD. Phil turned back in time to hear Wanda snap:

“Then why’s he missing? He’s _not_ pregnant. That mean he really is a traitor?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Phil snapped the paper down on the conveyor belt. “Des, I’ll take that too. Good to see you both.”

He paid for his groceries and left with a stiff gait. Behind him, the girl pushed her food forward, to catch Des’s attention. Phil glanced back once, to see her looking after him. After that, he watched his own feet as he headed off down the sidewalk.

The man they’d been gossiping about had once taken on an entire army from another dimension, with just a bow and arrow and a group of people he hardly knew. Phil had, like everyone else, soaked up every scrap of available information about the Avengers, after they’d saved New York-- and the world, really-- from the Chitauri Invasion three years back. If for no other reason than that one of the Avengers was _Captain America_ \-- even now, Phil could hear his five-year-old self squeal in delight. (And his fifteen-year-old self. Oh, hell, and his 25-year-old self, too.)

Hawkeye might be teased by the mass media from time to time, but he’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Captain America and the Black Widow and stormed the Triskelion, when HYDRA went down and nearly took SHIELD with it. Then he’d stood behind Director Fury through long months of Congressional hearings, along with Steve Rogers (as Phil thought of him in plainclothes) and Tony Stark and Maria Hill, defending the agency he’d given his loyalty and life to. Five-year-old Phil had believed in superheroes. 35-year-old Phil hadn’t believed in much of anything. At nearly 50, Phil had come to believe in one or two. 

Clint Barton was definitely one of them. It was more likely he’d be pregnant with an alien baby than that he’d be a traitor. 

He was in front of the runabout before he knew it, his brooding carrying him quickly over the streets and down onto the dock. She was shining in the evening sunlight, its low beams burnishing her ruddy mahogany nearly all the way to rocket red. Her sporty white stripes and brasswork needed some polish still after the storm, but Lola was a brave bonny girl all the same, and always happy to see him. Phil felt his heart rise a little as he finished stowing his bags and slid into the captain’s seat. The smooth warmth of her wheel relaxed him all the way.

Time to head back to his island, and his cottage, and his dog, and his chickens-- and the mysterious sandy-haired man with the bullet in his shoulder, who’d washed ashore from the Atlantic City side of his island, once upon a storm.

**Three**

"Oh, come on, Tom," Skye said, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard over the clatter of dirty dishes as she slapped the bus tub on the counter. "It's a Tuesday night, it's the off-season, how busy can it be? There's no other time I can do this!" 

Tom folded his arms over his ample belly and huffed back down at her. The one customer sitting on the edge of the bar, nursing her Coke, edged out of the way of their argument. At Skye's answering slap of a wet rag, she curled her hands around her drink and glared, before turning to watch the occupied tables near the stage.

Well, no sense antagonizing Tom further by annoying the customers; Skye pulled him over by the cash register. They'd been having this argument off and on all night, in between the orders-up and table bussing and splitting of bills. For a marshmallow of a man, he was being awfully firm about the whole thing. Still, Skye thought she had him mostly worn down. And she had one weapon left in her arsenal to deploy.

"Skye, damnit, I didn't hire you just so you could be unavailable every time I need a shift covered."

"It's just this once, boss, I promise," she said in reply, making sure to catch his gaze directly, and then shrugged down so she could look up at him, and batted her lashes. Doe eyes away!

She watched them impact, and his entire body slumped in defeat. Direct hit.

"Yeah, yeah, fine, Tuesday you can leave early. But goddamnit, Skye, I can't do this every time! You said you wanted twenty hours, I've given you twenty hours, or at least I've been trying! At this rate, the only hours you want are the ones we're not open."

"This is it, really, it is," Skye lied through her pearly teeth, and Tom laughed at her. 

"Hell," he said, and shook his head. "Whatever. I should just hire someone else and give them half your hours, huh? Then I might actually get my needs covered."

"If you can find anyone willing to work for tips this bad during the offseason," Skye shot back. (The tips were great, actually, but no reason to give ground where she didn't have to.)

"Damnit, girl, I didn't have to give you this job! You're not as rare a find as you think, Skye." Tom was turning red, visible even in the low light, and perhaps, just perhaps, Skye'd gone a little too far. And, well, she didn't _need_ the job, precisely, but she _did_ like to eat, so.... Tom was continuing with his rant, oblivious to her contrition. "Hell, lots of people want to work here! Bet I could find someone to fill those extra hours without even trying!" He waved a hand around the half-empty bar, and alighted on the dark-haired girl attempting to protect her soda. She was watching them both with an even smile. "Hey," he said to her, "how about you? You want a job here?"

The girl looked from Tom, to Skye, and back.

"Sure," she said, and shrugged. 

Skye ended up laughing so hard Tom had to thump her across the back, while blustering and trying to explain that he hadn't been serious, really, he'd need a resume and could she even wait tables? 

Oh, she could? Where? Oh... the one in New York, huh? Yeah, he'd heard of it. Skye caught her breath just as Tom shook the girl's hand, looking kind of dazed, and said he had to go and get an I-9, because apparently he had a new waitress.

That left Skye and the stranger standing next to each other, surveying the room. 

"So," Skye said, ignoring where Table 9 was starting to fidget and look around pointedly, "that was awkward."

"Not so much for me," said the girl, and Skye turned to look more closely at her new coworker. Young, dark curly hair, jean jacket and a Captain America t-shirt, and a surly look on her face.

"I'm Skye," Skye said, and held out her hand. "And that was the funniest thing I've seen in ages." The girl looked at the hand for a long moment, then slowly reached out and took it. Her palm was strong, dry, as no-nonsense as the rest of her seemed, and Skye found herself warming to the girl half against her will.

"America," she said. 

"Good to meet you, America," Skye replied, "what brings you to Long Beach Island after the tourist season?"

America cocked an eyebrow at her. 

"Makes you think I'm not from here?"

"Tom'd know you. Tom knows everyone, that's why it's good to work here," Skye said.

"Oh, yeah? What'd you do before you came here?"

"Eh," Skye shrugged. "Drifted a bit. Thought I wanted to find myself, owned a van, no one to care where I went, you know how it is." 

"Yeah," America replied after a judicious pause, "I do."

And at that moment, Skye thought-- no, Skye was pretty certain-- that she knew _exactly_ how it was. 

The slam of a chair falling to the floor broke into the tension between them. Skye turned to find that it had belonged to the tall, elegant girl who’d been sitting with a middle-aged bottle blonde, her back to the bar. The girl was on her feet and practically vibrating, looming over a short, pug-nosed regular from the next table over.

“Say. That. Again.” the girl hissed, and Skye wondered when she-- and America-- had moved close enough to hear the conversation. Speaking of America, she was cursing under her breath, and Skye glanced over at her. She was actually rolling up her sleeves. 

“Tom didn’t hire you to be a bouncer,” Skye whispered to her, putting one hand lightly on her wrist.

America muttered something highly unflattering about her mother, and Skye rolled her eyes.

“Jamie here doesn’t mean anything, he’s just drunk.” Another of the regulars, a big friendly lady-- Wanda? was that it?-- was pulling pug-nose back, but he kept on hopping forward. The tall girl wasn’t backing down, despite the fact that her tablemate had put her head in her finely-manicured hands and was muttering:

“Kate, don’t. Kate, don’t. Kate, for God’s sake what would your father say? Come on, stop it.”

Kate and Pug-Nose stared at each other for a long moment, and then Pug-Nose gritted out:

“Maybe Hawkeye really _is_ a traitor, is what I said. I’ll say it as many times as it takes. I tell you, it makes _sense_. Tha--” was all he managed before the girl’s fist connected with his mouth. He came up wiping his lips and spitting mad, and Kate was still standing over him.

Skye tightened her grip on America’s arm, or tried to, but America wrenched her hand away.

“Look, chica,” she said. “I don’t want to get off to a bad start with you, so let me go.”

“Not if you’re going to make it worse,” Skye snapped, though she did stuff her hands on her hips instead. “Are you?”

Tom had appeared at the tables, and was politely but firmly telling Jamie he’d had more than enough to drink. His next move was to apologize “Ms. Bishop” and her companion right out the door, promising to comp their meals. The argument was tidied away remarkably quickly, with only a parting:

“ _Well_ , I can see why they sent _her_ down here” from Wanda to wrap up the affair. America huffed loudly and spun on her heel. She was breathing hard, and Skye moved away slightly to give her space.

“She’s impressive,” Skye said gently after a moment, and meaning Kate Bishop. 

“She’s obsessed,” America growled, and ran her hands through her dark hair. “But yes, yes, damn her, Kate’s impressive as hell.” A shrug. “Just my luck, huh?”

The wisest course of action all around, Skye figured, was to say absolutely nothing, just to start polishing that bar. No need to rub the new girl’s weakness in her face; that seemed like about the worst course of action she could take. Still, if Kate Bishop was the breeze that America had drifted in on, it meant she was unlikely to interfere with what had really brought Skye to Long Beach Island so far from the tourist season. Not unless she wanted Skye to interfere right back. And she clearly didn't.

Skye pulled another Coke, added a cherry, and slid it down the bar to America’s clasped hands.

America looked up and gave her a wry smile, and Skye found herself smiling back.

"Truce?" she asked, and got a nod in response.

"Truce."  


**Four**

Clint wasn't too proud to admit it had been sheer luck that had kept the man from looking into the junipers and finding him huddled over an unconscious mutt, trying desperately not to engage in pulmonary emesis. Luck and good timing on someone's part (or maybe poor timing, if his suspicions about Jawbones' origins were correct) had been responsible for the reprieve. 

Just as Jawbones had been turning his beady-eyed gaze down over the porch rail, his pocket began playing _Wonderwall _. Clint fought down a snigger as the guy answered, a quick:__

__"Sir." Which was confirmation of a great many things, one way or another, and Clint willed his lungs to freeze. Lucky stirred under his fingers, and he started petting, using the shortest strokes he could manage._ _

__"No, I haven't found anything yet.... Yes, I know, they weren't exactly small.... Look, it's been over a week, I'm guessing any tracks are gone.... I am hurrying!"_ _

__Clint took a moment to try and memorize him as he talked; the angular face and piercing eyes, the discreet bulge of a handgun at his back under a gray windbreaker, the neatness of the black t-shirt and cargo pants. If the guy didn't know he screamed "operative," that the plain baseball cap he was pulling out of his back pocket and snapping open did nothing to soften the bland institutionality of his gear, Clint despaired of the younger generation. At least-- unfortunately, from Clint's point of view-- he didn't have a logo blazoned on his back or his shirt front._ _

__"Well how long have I got before he comes? Right.... I'll do as much as I can. I've cleared the big house.... No, sir. I know how to be friendly." That last was said in a tone of voice so clipped that it bordered on sulky. "Just a lost boater, that's me. I can be anything anyone wants."_ _

__Jawbones thumbed the off button and pocketed the phone, and Clint recognized it as a cheap flip phone, a classic burner. Which meant what? Was this little reconnaissance unsanctioned? Or were they just trying to play it doubly safe? Did they think appearing unofficial would make Clint drop his guard? Clint wasn't dropping a goddamn thing, unless it was an elbow in the guy's face. And in his current exhausted state, he was clearly not doing that._ _

__The sun was setting, deep gold creeping around the back of the house, the edges of the bushes, throwing himself and Lucky into branched shadow. Jawbones was already halfway around the house and over the low hill on his way down toward the shore-- and the cottage-- treading over his own distorted silhouette with every step._ _

___Aw, Jawbones, no_ Clint thought, and began to pull himself up. There was nothing of Clint's to find at the cottage, except a pair of boxers too torn and salt-stained to salvage, already tossed out with the general trash. Still, if someone knew what to look for, they'd find traces of him. The rumpled couch with its blanket nest only half cleaned away, the second toothbrush Phil had dug out from God knew where, two breakfast plates still sitting by the sink waiting to be cleaned. All very cozy and conjugal. _ _

__"Come on, dog," Clint said, trying to rouse Lucky in lieu of taking that train of thought further. "Come on, gotta wake up. Phil needs us." Because what if, instead of an empty cottage with an incriminating second pancake plate, Jawbones found Phil himself? And what if Jawbones wasn't as good at appearing innocent as he thought? (He wasn't.) And if Phil showed his suspicions openly.... Jawbones appeared to be exactly the kind of karate-chop-first-ask-questions-later guy Clint expected to try and neutralize the threat._ _

__No one was gonna neutralize Phil if Clint had anything to say about it._ _

__Lucky grumbled and shifted under him, blinking his one eye blearily and smacking his lips like he was parched. Poor guy probably was, Clint thought._ _

__"Phil, we gotta get to Phil," he repeated, and Lucky surged upwards at the urgency in his voice, then wobbled and nearly tipped over. He glared down at his own paws as if they had betrayed him. Clint pulled himself up by the side of the house and nearly fell as well. "God I know how you feel," he huffed, rubbing his knees and then doubling over in a coughing fit._ _

__Lucky looked up at him, eye wide and impatient and exhausted._ _

__"Aren't we a pair of fools?" Clint answered him. "C'mon, we got a Phil to save."  
_____ _

___To Be Continued...._ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on Washed Ashore: Phil takes his responsibilities towards his charges very seriously, Clint wrestles with his instincts, and several people decide it’s time to start dealing with the consequences of Hawkeye’s flight.
> 
> Need another shot of secret identities and Phlint UST? Go catch up with Faeleverte’s hot, hysterical serial [Male Order Bride.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1857444/chapters/3996936) It is summer reading at its very best-- smart, sexy, and sprightly.
> 
> Special thanks are due to Beta J, betaing from Mombasa these days, and to all of you in who’ve commented, in part for all the squee but even more for the conversations-- y’all are why I love the serial format. You make the coming chapters stronger, and you’re also making me want to bake. 
> 
> So, please join us in the comments section, where we’re talking pot pies, chickens, and pictures of bearded!Phil.


	4. True Colors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was bound to happen eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scene Three contains a somewhat graphic depiction of chicken slaughter and Scene Four includes chicken processing.

**One**

 

When he saw the cigarette boat tied up on the dock, bobbing along two feet below the deck on the low tide, Phil decided to leave the bandages in Lola. And the pot pies, and all the other incriminating evidence. He debated taking the boat hook, but settled for his bare hands.

He'd used to be pretty dangerous with them, after all. And they _looked_ innocent enough. Big and horny from outdoor work in all seasons, they were no longer hands that had very obviously held assault weapons. (Useless weapons, when it had come down to it. Utterly useless.) Anyway, no man born or bred to boats went anywhere without a nice one-handed rigging knife, and Phil's was more than sharp enough to cut a line or a....

 _What the hell is this bloodthirstiness? Where did this come from?_ Phil frowned as he pulled himself up on the dock and began his long walk down it, to the little path that led through the dunes and to his cottage. The planking creaked under him and the shadows of the dunes streaked across the shore, the roof of the cottage already dark and looming behind them. 

Then another shadow crossed between the dunes, attenuated and wrong, completely the opposite of Frank's distinctive compact frame. It backed up, hovered in the entrance to the path as if uncertain whether to come or go, then started forward.

"Hi!" Phil said, forcing his body not to tense up. 

"Hi!" said the shadow, and resolved itself into a tall young man with a jawbone sharper than the keels of some boats. He was dressed in something that might have been New York fashion, but might equally have been generic skulking clothes, complete with navy ballcap. 

"Can I help you?" Phil asked, stuffing his hands in his pockets (curling his fingers lightly over his knife) and even in the dusk, he saw the man's glance follow them briefly before returning to his face. That was the moment the hair rising on the back of his neck made sense, and he blessed the instincts that had led to him leaving his packages in Lola. _This is not some lost weekender_.

"Maybe? Are you the Keeper here?" His smile was genial enough, and he held his hand out all friendly-like, forcing Phil's own into the open to shake. Shake he did, keeping his eyes locked on the young man's until it was done. He let his hands rest on his hips on return, easing into the stance he'd used in the Army, when his men were reporting back from a recon mission. _No enemies here, now all you have to do is tell me._ The younger man settled just like his boys had, poor fool. 

"I am."

_Go ahead, kid, your move._

"I, ah, came down from New York." The kid said after a moment, and Phil believed him. "They told me over in Gansett that there was an old mansion out here that Howard Stark used to own. I wanted to take a look? If you do that? I love old houses." Nervous, milquetoast smile, and every word was quite true and sincere and Phil wanted to fling him back into his boat.

 _Where did you come from?_ he didn't ask, and _Are you looking for Frank? You can't have him._ Where the hell _was_ Frank, anyway? Or Lucky? Why didn't he hear Lucky barking? _What the hell have you done with them?_ he didn't snap.

"This island still belongs to the family, and Mr. Stark doesn't like anyone touring the property," Phil told him, letting regret infuse his voice. _Mr. Stark doesn't want anyone bothering his research projects_ more like. "But if you write to him, he might make an exception. He does sometimes."

"Oh yeah?" The guy turned to look back at the cottage and dunes, and Phil took the opportunity to slip forward on the dock until he was between them and the man, on pretense of straightening a coil of mooring line that had come half-loose. "What he doesn't know though...." The kid trailed off suggestively, and at least had the sensitivity not to go for his wallet. Phil forced a smile and shook his head.

"Can still get me fired, sorry. He's real touchy about it. That's a nice little boat you have there. You bring it down yourself or rent it from George?"

(He'd rented it from George-- the registration was in plain sight-- and if he was smart, he'd realize it was time to get right the fuck back in it.)

"Rented it," the guy said, and looked Phil up and down for a long moment. Phil held his smile and his stance: one hand slipped into his pocket, head cocked with polite interest. The air between them had gone dense with possibility, and Phil saw himself moving forward, felt his right hand pulling out and up, flicking the knife open as it moved, his left sweeping around to grab the boy's right forearm and pull. He knew the smile would still be on his face if he did.

The boy's gaze dropped to the boat, and when Phil was still watching him when he looked back up, his shoulders slumped, just a fraction. 

"Well," he said, "worth a shot anyway."

"Come back with a note from Stark, and I'll be more than happy to show you everything," Phil told him, and was magnanimous enough in victory to hold the line for the kid as he got into the boat, then help him cast off. "Hey," he called, as the kid was motoring away, "who d'you work for anyway?"

The kid looked back, eyes dark, and his hand tightened on the throttle.

"Don't worry, we get you guys all the time. The last one was Hammer Industries. That you, too?" 

It was too dark to see more, at the distance the kid had put between them. Phil turned to saunter back to his boat and unload his boxes as if nothing were at all wrong.

____

Something was, of course, _very_ wrong. That kid was no more Hammer Industries than Lucky was, and his footprints in the soft sand around the edges of the dune showed he'd been coming from further along the shore. Possibly even, if he'd spiraled down from the hill, from the direction of the old house itself. Phil looked up past the tops of the bayberries and the beach plums, to where he could just see the old place looming on the center of the island, and the very start of the slope around it.

Where he'd asked Frank to take Lucky, this afternoon. 

Frank, the invalid with his lungs still raw from seawater and a bullet wound that he refused to talk about healing in his bicep. And his mutt, his happy-go-Lucky one-eyed dog who knew the sound of Lola and was always at his door, waiting for him.

Phil tore through his cottage and yard, calling for them both, but only the clucks of chickens answered him.

Hell. Just... _hell._

 _If he hurt them_.... Phil felt the weight of the knife again in his mind, as he started off to the interior of the island.

The light had faded from pink and gold into the even blue of twilight before Phil saw them coming, silhouetted against the hill, and he closed his eyes and exhaled half a thanksgiving.

Frank was staggering, but he seemed determined, head bowed over the bulk of the dog he carried in his arms. The dog turned, cocked his head, then barked once in satisfaction. He didn't leave Frank's arms, though, not even when Frank's head came up and he stopped short, entire body sagging in relief.

"Phil," he said, and Phil knew he should start forward, he knew he should take Lucky from Frank's arms, but instead he let relief wash over him like a flood as he just stood and stared for a moment. Frank wasn't moving, either, and some emotion crossed his face like shadows moving in deep water. 

Lucky wriggled a little in his arms, and the spell broke. Phil was on him in a minute, gathering the warm furry bulk of the dog into his own arms.

"There was someone prowling around the mansion; bastard tranq'ed Lucky," Frank said as he withdrew his hands, and Phil tried not to be affected by the brush of skin against his. "I kept out of sight till he was gone-- he seemed to be looking for objects, not Franks, anyway. Then Lucky and I set off to try and warn you. Poor dog tried his best, but he's still wobbly on his feet."

"Unlike you," Phil murmured, and watched Frank shrug and run a hand through the hair on the back of his neck in a self-deprecatory gesture. (And how come Phil had learned Frank's body language so quickly?)

"Yeah, well, I'm better now that I see you." Frank said, then blinked. "That you're okay, I mean. You see the guy?"

"I did; he said he was here for a tour."

"Bull _shit_ he was here for a tour," Frank growled, patting Lucky on the head as they turned to walk back to the cottage. He was lagging and trying not to show it; Phil slowed his steps to match.

"I agree. We get spies here sometimes." Phil paused when he saw Frank whip his head around to look at him. "Corporate espionage is worse than I'd ever have thought before coming here; but most of 'em don't carry a gun in the backseat of their pants. What do you think? Glock or Beretta?"

"Glock," Frank said easily, then "Corporate espionage?"

"Everyone wants to know why Stark keeps the place around."

"Why _does_ Stark keep the place around? Not like he ever visits," Frank said. "Near as I can tell, I mean."

"Howard Stark's pet project, actually. Hydroelectric power, harnessing tidal energy. We've got a small buoy farm out on the spit that edges out of the bay." Phil jerked his head in that direction. "The power plant's here, it's actually what provides the cottage with power. You'd have seen me fixing the lines earlier this week if you'd have been well enough. Tony Stark mostly benignly neglects the place, but every few months we get some scientists of his out here poking and prodding and trying to improve the power storage and conversion. Not really commercially viable until that happens, I guess. But it's good enough for us."

"So Stark's trying to complete what his Daddy never could?" Frank's laugh was harsh. "Figures. What's the good word from town? Much damage from the storm?"

Phil watched him closely as he walked ahead into the cottage, trying to decide if Frank was trying deliberately to change the topic from the young man who was definitely not a corporate spy, or if he’d merely gotten bored.

"Not bad, thankfully. I brought us pot pies for dinner. Everyone was concerned about poor injured Lucky.” He set the wobbly, but otherwise whole, dog in question on the porch floor, and watched him weeble into the house. "Otherwise nothing too exciting." 

Frank held open the door for him a moment, and Phil felt the warmth of his breath as he passed close in the little hall. Despite the work of the waves and the bullet on him, and a day that had clearly been filled with over-exertion and ended in some kind of desperate attempt to come to Phil’s rescue, it was still impossible to think of the man as weak. His entire body was formed and honed and made for action, and his hands, where they'd brushed Phil's, were calloused and sure.

"Hey," he said as he turned to go into the kitchen and begin unpacking his boxes, "one funny bit of gossip from New York. You know Hawkeye's gone missing?"

"What?" Frank's voice was light, easy. Airless, almost. "The Avenger? Yeah, I'd heard. They find him?"

"No. Well, not unless you believe...." he let it hang until the silence broke.

"Believe what?" Frank's back was to him, his shoulders set and still.

"Someone prevented a theft at the Met Gala the other night. Used a bow and arrow. A girl."

"So not Hawkeye, then. Unless he's started dressing in drag." Was that a little relaxation about the edges of Frank's silhouette? Phil decided yes.

"Then again, the shot was from cover, between two guards, and across the entire ballroom. And hit the thief in the hand." 

Frank's face, when he turned, was full of honest confusion. _Very_ honest confusion. 

"No one makes that shot but--" he bit his lip, then shrugged. "But him. Well, so someone’s taken his place already, I guess. Unless the media’s exaggerated it by half; they tend to do that. They’ve got no idea how to tell the difference between technically difficult and just plain showy. So, tell me about these pot pies."

"You've never had half so good in your life," Phil said, and let Frank come to stand with him and lean against the counter as he worked. "And in case you were wondering, no one reported any boats capsizing during Fred."

Frank looked up at him, confused.

"So we still have no idea what happened to the one you were on," Phil said gently, and after a moment, saw Frank nod.

"And do you still want me to go see a doctor?"

"I don't see what good it would do," Phil allowed, slowly, as if he were only now coming to the decision. "You're safer here, I think." He let himself hold Frank's gaze for a moment, then smiled and dropped his eyes to the pie crust he was poking holes in. _And I wish you'd believe that, and let me help you, before we get another visitor._

 

**Two**

 

Frank was clearly not going to last long that night, so Phil pushed him down at the kitchen table after dinner and had his shirt off him quickly-- it was always best to do it quickly so he didn’t linger on the moment when Frank’s broad, scarred chest and sides came into view, or the way the muscles played in the shifting planes of his back. Phil was getting very good at working around his arousal by now, and he did so tonight, even with Frank’s tawny head drooping and hitting Phil’s temple as it went.

Phil nudged him awake with his forehead, and Frank started up, blinking at him as unfocused as an owl in the daytime. An owl with eyes like the ocea-- no. There was no way he was completing that thought. He’d never be able to live with himself if he did.

“Hey, Phil?” Frank asked, after he’d roused himself, “how’d you get so good at this kind of thing?”

“What kind of thing?” Phil let the question distract him from the contemplation of Eyes, acceptable colors for (and how Frank’s weren’t).

“The whole gunshot wound thing.” 

“Hrmph.” Phil finished patting the wound down with an antiseptic wipe, and reached for the gauze. It was a good job, if he said so himself, and the healing wound still smelled clean and sweet. Frank would be weak in the wing for a little, but no worse for the wear. His biggest fear, after a concussion was off the table, had been infection setting in. No MRSA here, thank god. “I did first responder training in the Army. All my unit did. Not my MOS, though.”

“Yeah? What unit were you in?” Phil couldn’t tell if Frank was really interested, or trying to keep himself awake. He paused a moment, his fingers dimpling into the tanned flesh of Frank’s arm as he considered.

“Rangers. Third battalion, 75th.”

That got a low whistle.

“Tough shit.”

“I guess. You serve?” Because it would explain a hell of a lot about the body beneath Phil’s hands… which he was not going to think about in those terms, either.

“After a fashion,” Frank said, and then was silent while Phil rolled gauze around his arm to keep the pad on. Just when Phil was beginning to think it was safe, out popped the dreaded question:

“Why’d you leave? What’s a Ranger like you doing on an island like this?” Phil came very close to snapping _you should know better than to ask that question_. His mouth was open to form the first words before it occurred to him that Frank might be, finally, trying to feel him out a bit. Story for story, maybe.

“Not a lot to tell. Just didn’t have much use left in me if I stayed. I got out in ‘97, stayed in New York for a while trying to be a good citizen and a good boyfriend, but I failed at both, or maybe they failed me.” He shrugged; it was the truth, after a fashion. It was hard to tell at this distance, but he didn’t think the job, the boring security consultant suit-and-tie mess, would have lasted much longer anyway. He’d have been let go eventually, if he hadn’t quit in the midst of the depression that followed the news Archstone Global had lost his boyfriend somewhere in the Balkan mountains. Just a small slip, surely they’d put him around there somewhere. Checked under the couch?

Phil dragged his mind back to the present; that was nearly fifteen years gone, now, and if he hadn’t lost his lover that way, he was pretty certain he’d have gotten dumped at some point. He hadn’t been a very interesting person, at the time. 

Wasn’t a very interesting person now; Frank was drooping again.

“I guess I came here because I really didn’t want people around,” Phil whispered, smoothing the bandage tape down. He was certain Frank was asleep, up until he heard the quiet voice in his ear:

“Well, I’m lucky you’re letting me hang around, anyway.” And then Frank gave him a soft smile, got up off the table, and promptly fell asleep on Phil’s shoulder on the way back to the couch.

Phil sighed, and watched the man a long time after he’d tucked him under the big afghan: the rise and fall of his chest, the glow of his sunken face in the firelight.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself after a while, and left.

 

**Three**

 

“I’m afraid she’s not going to make it,” Phil said, and Frank nodded his head sadly and stuck his hands in his pockets. He’d been following Phil around all afternoon, helping with chores and saying very little. It had been surprisingly comfortable, and Phil was trying not to question it, just for one more day.

They both stared down at the buff-colored hen a little longer, taking in the weak way she rustled in her corner, head barely lifted.

“Aw, chicken,” Frank said after a moment, and squatted down to pet her gently on the head. “It’s gonna be okay.” In the same quiet voice, still watching the hen, he continued: “How you wanna play this? Have you got a set-up, or is this your basic neck-wringing situation?”

“Ah, I’ve got a slaughtering cone out in the shed,” Phil said, feeling his heart sink just a little, watching the dark beady little eyes under their half-masted lids. “Just cleaned this morning, and I’ve got the scalding tank filled and ready. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use it, but…” He trailed off and gestured helplessly at the listless hen. 

“Yeah, best to be prepared for the worst.” Frank was standing up now, the chicken cradled in his arms, and he gave Phil a _where to?_ glance, then followed docilely at Phil’s nod and turn. 

They walked side by side in silence, stepping over the beach trash Phil had yet to have time to clean from the yard. The shed sat a fair distance from the henhouse, back where the end of the domestic portion of the cottage’s yard met the beginning of the portion that housed the tools Phil used as keeper of the island. Beach plums shaded it, and sand covered the path to the doorway.

Inside, the shed was low-roofed but airy, and the small concrete cubicle Phil used for messy duties smelled faintly of bleach from his morning’s spray wash. The lone slaughtering cone-- just an up-ended traffic cone mounted downwards through a set of boards, and the tip cut off-- glowed in the evening light.

Phil glanced towards Frank, then down at the chicken he was holding out. Phil gave her a last pat on the head, letting his fingers linger on the softness of her feathers, the hard poke of the quills, her cool body. For a brief moment, he hoped she was already gone. The tiny rustle might have been hers, or Frank shifting her in his arms, as he turned back to the cone and slid her gently in. Phil watched him for a moment and then went to get the knife.

The end was quick and relatively quiet, and as her blood spilled into the bucket Frank placed beneath her they were left in the filtered light, smelling bleach and blood and breathing quietly, shoulder to shoulder.

“Goddamnit,” Phil said at last, and Frank nodded. 

They cleaned up in silence.

It wasn’t until they were back on the porch, and Phil was plucking her while Frank shucked corn, the feathers and husks both going into the same 5-gallon bucket, that he said anything more. 

“Thank you for helping; I hate that part.”

Frank shrugged.

“Who likes it? You keep animals, you better be prepared to be responsible for their deaths as well as their lives. Same as anything you’ve got responsibility over.” He looked up, stared out over the yard and the low stands of bayberry. “I’d think worse of you if you had let her suffer.” 

Damp feathers stuck to Phil’s hands, and he paused a moment to shake them out, looking down at the scalded half-nude carcass in his lap. It had taken him eight years of island life before he'd dared install his first flock. And two days of recovery time after he'd had to slaughter one the first time: a plump Rhode Island Red who'd been mauled by a visiting dog. He hadn't been able to bring himself to eat that one-- he still remembered apologizing to its limp body for wasting it.

“I might need a dull knife to get all the pins out,” he said. Frank nodded and got up.

He came back with a butter spreader, and Phil blinked down at it and then up at Frank, who shrugged. And coughed, just a little, before biting it back. Which might explain, in retrospect, why his voice had been kind of unsupported earlier-- and wasn’t really a good thing. Phil couldn’t afford to have him hiding his continued weakness.

“You look unphased by this. Have you slaughtered chickens before?” he asked as Frank sat back down, deliberately keeping it light.

“Chickens? Nah. Other animals once in a while.” A shrug. “No stranger to blood.” The unspoken _neither are you_ that might have hung in the air between them somehow failed to do so. Phil knew perfectly well it was all in his own head, and looked back over at Frank as his heavy-knuckled hands picked each individual silk from the ends of the sweet corn he was shucking.

“Thank you,” he said softly, “Clint.”

Frank shrugged off the thanks awkwardly and went on shucking for a moment, before suddenly pausing. It was a brief pause, and he attacked his next ear of corn with hardly more than his usual vigor, but it was enough.

When they’d come back to the house, Frank had pulled the bag of corn out without a second thought or a question for Phil. As if he already knew what Phil was going to suggest for dinner, and how much Phil hated how the silk stuck to his jeans, his hands, his everything when he shucked it. The way he settled onto the porch, as if he’d been setting his ass in the same worn spot for years, was one further proof just how at ease he was in Phil’s home. 

Now tension and uncertainty were flooding back into Frank’s body, and the difference was nearly obscene. It caught Phil entirely by surprise-- he hadn’t realized just how far that tension had receded in his presence until he saw it return.

Perhaps it ought to have occurred to him earlier how easy their synchronization had become, since far before they slaughtered the hen. How Frank-- still _Frank_ for these last moments-- made coffee for them both in the early mornings as a matter of ritual, just “that thing he did every day after hacking his lungs up” in the post-rising dawn. Clean dishes in the rack every night after dinner, onions chopped to a translucent dice for the chowder, boots tucked away under the deacon’s bench….

All of it disappeared like a clearing mist before Phil’s eyes, as Frank’s shoulders filled in, straightened, hunched, heaved quietly. Phil had a moment’s desire to take it back, to ignore it completely, make it as if it had never happened. He wondered if Frank was feeling the same thing, but….

“It is you, isn’t it? You’re Hawkeye,” Phil said into the gathering dusk, his fingers sticky with down and a chicken head flopped accusingly on his lap. “It fits. You washing up here, not far from Atlantic City. The bullet wound. How good your aim is when you throw things at seagulls… your hands…. The stranger who was here, who came looking around, he wasn’t just someone who works for Hammer Industries, that guy was a spy or an agent of some sort, straight enough. The news said SHIELD was still investigating your disappearance.”

Frank shrugged, twisted his lips, broke off the stalk of another ear of corn. 

“Sounds kinda crazy, Phil,” he said at last. “Do I look like some sort of superhero?”

Phil took the question seriously, and looked. Frank was still pale from the loss of blood and the respiratory distress that had accompanied his near-drowning. His chin was heavily dusted with golden hair now, and the dark circles under his eyes played their own part in betraying his general dilapidated state. But underneath it all was a body that was well-maintained and-- now that Phil had finally read the signs of it fully-- maintained for a purpose with which he was not unfamiliar. Bow and arrow or gun and bayonet, a fighter was a fighter.

He condensed all that into a simple “Yes.”

Frank looked back at him. 

No. 

Clint Barton, Hawkeye, looked back at him.

It would have been hard to mistake those sharp eyes for those of anyone else in the world, and Phil felt his own gaze go mild and unthreatening as milk. He’d learned it in the Rangers, used it in gentling the civilians he talked to as they passed through villages, in caring for his chickens.

“You’re safe with me, Clint,” Phil told him, pushing back the part of his brain that was laughing hysterically at the thought and sending him images of tightropes, snapping lines, breaking masts, falling children. “As long as you need to stay, you’re safe here.” Clint looked down at the hen in Phil’s hands, back up at him. 

“If…” he said, rolled the word around thickly on his tongue, paused, started again. “If I am Hawkeye, Phil. If I am… I’m not safe anywhere.”

“You are. Clint, I promise, I’ve got your six.” Using the old lingo was all that was keeping Phil sane just at that moment. He stroked the remaining patch of feathers on the chicken, fighting his impulse to leap in and fill the silence. 

“No.” Clint shook his head violently. “Not worried about _me_. They’ll be coming for me. More of them. And that’ll put you in danger. It’s one thing to save a guy from drowning, patch up his wounds, Phil. That… you don’t want to be in the middle of that.”

“I don’t--” 

Clint cut him off with a curt hand gesture, and got to his feet.

“I won’t _put_ you in the middle of that.” 

“You already have,” Phil said simply.

“Well excuse me for not choosing a different section of beach to wash up on!” Clint flung his hands up, glared back down. “I can make up for it by getting out of your goddamned hair now!”

“If you try to do any such bullshit macho thing, I’ll just end up hauling your ass back here when you collapse halfway across the bay in the skiff,” Phil told him. “You still cough up half your lungs each morning or if you move faster than a walk. Hell, walking from the cottage to the mansion winds you a bit. So spare us both the embarrassment and the inconvenience, and sit back down.”

Hawkeye’s glare, Phil was fairly certain, should be counted in with the other weapons in his inventory; it must be as deadly as any of his incendiaries, and just as well-aimed. It took him a long moment to realize the glare was directed as much inwards as outwards, then Clint collapsed with a muffled cough and nodded.

He looked flat-out miserable as the fight went out of him.

“I’d have taken the runabout,” he said, sullen. “I’m not a total idiot.”

“Yes, I know,” Phil said mildly. “I disabled the motor tonight. I’m not a total idiot either.” 

“So what do you suggest I do?” Clint asked, and slid back down the post to slump onto the steps in a puff of cornsilk.

“You could start by telling me the truth,” Phil said, trying to toss it off as casually as any completely mundane suggestion like “read a book.” Clint curled his lips. After a long moment, he dropped his head back and closed his eyes.

“Tell me what you think you know, first,” he said. “Tell me what they’re saying.”

“I already told you what I _know_ ,” Phil replied, and felt the tension go out of him with the last pluck of feathers, glad they’d lasted as long as they had so that he didn’t have to think of what to do with his hands. He picked up the spreader and started gliding it over the chicken skin, looking for pins. “You haven’t been seen in weeks, no one’s sure if you’re dead or captured, the Avengers and SHIELD aren’t issuing any statements, there’s an unconfirmed sighting in Atlantic City. But what they say? The media?” he shrugged. “What _don’t_ they say? Maybe you’re a traitor, maybe you’ve been kidnapped and they’re afraid if the media gets hold of it they won’t be able to ransom you, maybe you’re dying, maybe you’ve had a sex-change operation, maybe you’re undercover as an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas, maybe you’re pregnant--”

Clint laughed. Very much, Phil thought, in spite of himself, but at least it wasn’t shouting or glaring or pouting. They might just get through the evening after all.

“Pregnant? Okay, that one’s new.”

“Well, equal opportunity rumor-mongering, these days,” Phil shrugged. “You show people one alien invasion and they think _anything_ is possible.”

“Yes, well, I hope on your extensive list of accomplishments, birthin’ babies is listed.”

“It’s got to be in Foxfire somewhere,” Phil said, and brandished his denuded chicken. “Dinner?”

“Yeah alright,” Clint said quietly, and got up. “Beats the alternatives, anyway.”

 

**Four**

 

“Beats the alternatives anyway,” Steve said, and shrugged. Natasha looked up at him where he stood in the doorway trying to act casual (as much as it was possible to do so in a shirt that accentuated each and every single one of his scientific muscles).

“The alternatives are going in short-handed or going in short-handed, so it wouldn’t take much,” Natasha said gently, and Steve winced.

“I thought you liked Sam,” he tried again, and that got him a laugh. She _did_ like Sam. You had to be dead or a HYDRA agent not to like Sam Wilson, and come to think of it, there were probably members of both categories that were at least a little fond of him.

"If he's willing to put up with us, I have no complaints. He never was before now." Before, however, they had not been short-handed. 

When they’d first formed the Avengers weren’t called out that often, and Sam had very firmly told them no each time Steve or Tony Stark or one of the SHIELD liaisons had asked for help. He could do more good elsewhere, he’d said. Lately, though, the situations for which a team of superheroes were thought to be useful were increasing in frequency. Hawkeye had been badly missed the last few times out, but the final straw had come the day before. They’d been fighting some asshole (as Clint would have phrased it) calling himself Blackout, who’d somehow learned how to suck the energy from things. Before they’d shut him down, he’d snuck up on the Hulk and taken him down; Bruce wasn’t out of medical yet. 

Sam's skills weren't quite a replacement for Hawkeye's long-distance work, but at least he had the team tactical abilities their other flyers lacked. Neither Iron Man nor Thor was going to be calling patterns anytime soon. 

"He's doing us a favor," Steve wandered over to the window ever so nonchalantly and looked out. He'd been doing that often lately; Natasha wondered if he realized it was always the big front entrance and plaza he was watching. As if Clint would ever come sauntering to the front door if he came back home. (On reflection, he might. But only as a distraction from whatever he'd arranged to blow up.)

"And keeping him off the streets is a bonus for you," she murmured, returning to the subject of Sam. The two of them had glommed onto each other within minutes of meeting, and Natasha had hoped at the time that Sam would help Steve find some perspective. Instead, Steve had dragged Sam into the mess around Project Insight and the scouring of SHIELD. It had seemed to Natasha like a nasty thing to do to such a nice guy, but Sam clearly thought Steve had hung the stars, after that. 

Soldiers. Typical.

Ever since Sam had moved to Harlem to stay close to his new friend Captain America, there had been sightings of a winged vigilante around the neighborhood. She was not at all surprised at that; Sam had never returned home mentally from the war, after Steve sucked him back in when they took the Triskelion. Steve had the grace to blush as he nodded at her diagnosis of the situation. He worried about Sam more than a little. 

"This doesn't mean I'm giving up on Clint," he promised her, and Nat laughed despite herself. 

"You're constitutionally incapable of doing that," she said fondly. 

He smiled, and they settled into a companionable silence. 

Steve was the one to break it, shifting to leave. As he did, he called over his shoulder to her:

"If you end up finding him, don't tell me. Better if I can honestly play the Simple Guy if anybody asks."

As he left, Natasha rolled her eyes. Because yes, of course, Steve would expect her to do for Clint exactly what he'd done for Bucky Barnes once he’d realized the man was alive: go find him. Whatever the cost.

She wanted to go find Clint, oh how she wanted to. She had promised herself she would. But Fury, like Steve, would be expecting her to do that. All her digging so far had been done deliberately far afield from where she thought he might be. Having laid the false trail, it was time to start searching for the true one, which was far more dangerous. She was going to have to do this oh, so carefully, or risk leading them right to him when she found him.

Of _course_ she was going to find him. No question about it.

____

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on Washed Ashore: Clint explains it all, Phil makes a declaration, another newcomer to town is introduced, Kate continues to be Kate, and Skye skulks.
> 
> A note on the slaughter: Phil’s intent is to use the most humane method he can. He’s not quite as careful with the actual processing of the chicken-- I assume no one’s going to attempt to use this story as a chicken-processing manual. It would be a bad idea. 
> 
> All of you who have taken the time to comment, I have been _blown away_ by you guys. Sorry about the chicken. As a tumblr bonus, here are [research images and links](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/91699677696/washed-ashore-chapter-4-kathar-marvel-cinematic) for some of Phil's flock.


	5. Coming About

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint explains, Phil’s cousin comes to town, and Phil and Kate get off to a shaky start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All living chickens stay alive in this chapter.

**One**

 

Once the worst was over and he'd confirmed that he had a Hawkeye in his house, Phil thought it best to table the rest of the conversation while he and Clint finished eviscerating and chilling the chicken and prepared dinner. They came into the cottage without speaking and set about their preparations as they had the last several nights, and Phil tried not to be too obvious as he watched his companion. Clint was clearly shaky; he navigated around Phil like he was going over hidden shoals. Clearly, waiting was the right choice. Shaky might be a plus for interrogations, but that was the last thing Phil wanted to call to mind when they talked. He'd promised Clint safety, after all. Starting out by pressuring him when he'd just received a mental full-body blow seemed... counterproductive.

Phil's own sudden desire to reel them both back from this strange shore, just for a moment longer, before the fog lifted and he saw what he'd committed to, was certainly _not_ influencing matters. Not at all. His own safety wasn't an issue; you didn't become a Ranger by hesitating to risk that for a good cause. And Phil had been a damn good Ranger; it was civilian life that he'd proved so disappointing at.

No, he was happy to risk _himself_. If he was hesitating, well-- as Clint had just brought home to him on the steps-- it wasn't just him at stake. He risked his charges-- island, canine, and fowl-- too. It should give him pause.

Clint seemed grateful for the reprieve at first-- or possibly just grateful that the newly-slaughtered chicken wasn’t on the dinner menu yet. He was nimble enough when preparing the spice rub to slather on the anonymous bird they were going to eat. Within a few minutes, however, silence began to weigh heavily. The potatoes seemed oddly cumbersome in his hands, the chicken slid alarmingly through his fingers, and the jar lids all stuck. Phil carefully ignored it, unsure what to say. 

Finally Clint sighed, stepped back, and, with a helpless shrug, left the rest of the preparation to Phil. Phil glanced Clint’s way in acknowledgement, hoping he was projecting the right degree of reassurance, then turned his head back to the roasting pan as Clint left the little kitchen. 

He forced himself not to look in the direction Clint had gone until he was sure the man was out of sight, then closed his eyes and sighed when he heard him puttering in the den.

_Gently. Gently. He hasn't run. Don't spook him now._

\----

Clint ended up ensconced on the window seat in the little den, drawing his fingers over the screen and staring out at the violet brushes of sweet joe pye waving in the planting beneath the window. It had been so stifling in the kitchen all of a sudden, the weight of the coming conversation suffocating him. Part of him wanted to snap, get it all over with, pour everything out and hear the worst, whatever that would be. Not "you can't stay here," apparently. But that still left far too many possible outcomes to the conversation. 

He needed space.

Lucky joined him after a moment, pinning his feet down on the cushions as he flopped over them. He’d stuck close to Clint since the afternoon before, leaning into Clint’s knees while sighing whenever Clint stayed in one place too long. 

“I didn’t do that much,” Clint told him, ruffling his ears. “Just carried you home while Phil took care of things.” Phil _did_ take care of things, from castaways with bullet wounds, to intruders with shady credentials, to ailing chickens. He did it with a practical grace that made Clint go a little weak at the knees. It had been all too easy to fall in alongside him, never noticing how well they worked together until now, when it was all coiling back into tense silences and awkward elbows.

The creak of a body dropping into the old mission-style armchair and leaning back was the first indication Clint had that Phil had come into the room-- and that in itself was disturbing. 

“Chicken’s in the oven, potatoes are baking,” Phil said, and held out a bottle, condensation beading against his fingers. Clint reached out and took it by the neck, careful to avoid brushing Phil’s hand with his. 

“Shandy?” he said, frowning down at the label, then up at Phil, who had retrieved a lowball of scotch from the broad oak arm of his chair. Phil shrugged, and smiled a little over his glass.

“Painkillers,” he responded. “But I thought you might need something.”

“Shandy,” Clint repeated, his voice falling flat, “is not going to be enough to get me through this conversation.”

“I know it’s not,” Phil paused for a moment, and licked his lips nervously before pressing them together, clearly reconsidering his words. Clint shifted uneasily on the seat, bringing his knees up and leaning his elbows on them to prevent himself from moving towards Phil. “You wouldn’t be using a cover without a good reason, and I realize it’s difficult to trust anyone right now, but… I promise you whatever’s going on, the secret’s safe with me.”

That drew a kind of sobbing laughter from Clint, and a helpless head shake. The worst part was that Phil seemed to honestly mean it. It had to be hopelessly naive, although that would be a side of Phil he’d never seen. The other alternative, though, was impossible: that he would willingly walk into an obviously dangerous situation for someone he barely knew, against enemies he couldn’t know, and expect to keep his promise. Since Clint would have bet his life that Phil, while possibly cracked in the head, was a man of his word.

Clint _was_ betting his life, had been betting his life for a while now. He took a swallow of shandy to cover his confusion and rolled it around in his mouth a bit, swallowing the lemony beer and the start of tears at the same time. 

“You say that without knowing what I might have done,” Clint settled on, when the silence had gone on long enough that he had to fill it.

“I know what you’ve done,” Phil said, leaning forward to look directly at Clint. His eyes were calm. “Everyone knows.” He shrugged again and dropped his gaze, his lips going a little wry. “You saved the world more than once. Not only from an alien invasion, but from a disease growing in the organization you’d called home. After the Triskelion fell, and the details came out about your… experiences… with Loki just prior to the Battle of New York, you sat in front of any and every tribunal anyone could possibly throw at you. You could have retired then, any normal person would have.” Phil was shaking his head now, frowning and still looking down, and if Clint was reading him right, he was a bit incredulous. (It was a reaction Clint was pretty used to; he recognized the symptoms when he saw them.) 

“But I’m an idiot,” Clint prompted him, when Phil seemed to have petered out. Phil blinked up at him.

“God, no, Clint. What I mean is… you’ve given more than any one person should be asked to give, already. I literally cannot imagine you having done something that would make me sorry to have made you that promise. You’re _Hawkeye_. If there are actual good guys left in this world, you _are_ one.” 

Of all the things Clint was unprepared for, to find Phil’s eyes actually _shining_ at him topped the list. He swallowed around the constriction in his throat, the way bile was creeping up from his belly. He was Hawkeye. Of course.

“That sounds more like Captain America, Phil. I used to be a… I’m not a hero. Anything I did… anything I do, it’s reparations. And I don’t just mean from before I joined SHIELD.”

“Oh, save it for the Marines, Clint. I was a Ranger,” Phil snapped at him, and Clint straightened despite himself. “You can’t teach me shit about tough choices and things you’re not proud you’ve done, for your country or for whatever fucking else. And I think you know that. That word ‘hero’ gets thrown about too damn freely these days, but I know one when I see one. So just fucking accept it.”

Clint stopped himself from saying _sir, yes sir_ , only by clamping his teeth shut on the words. The entire conversation was giving him a queasy feeling, like the solid seat beneath his ass was rocking on the open ocean.

“Sorry?” he tried instead, and Phil snorted.

“For _what_?”

“Dunno. It seemed like it was worth a try.” With luck, the light was getting low enough to hide the heat that was racing up the back of Clint’s neck and threatening to take over his ears. “For being an idiot, I guess? And getting myself shot and making myself a fugitive for reasons I don’t even understand? Then landing here and putting Lucky in danger, and eating your food and needing to be patched up and getting in your hair?”

“Oh yes, because god knows harboring an actual Avenger in my den has been a real hardship,” Phil grumped, and then he did a truly horrible thing: he _blushed_. The pink flushed outwards from his cheeks, disappeared into his beard, reemerged at his ears and neck, and crept downwards. 

Clint couldn’t help it; he doubled over with laughter. It wasn’t funny. Okay-- the blush was funny. Actually, yes, looked at that way, the whole thing was funny. The sheer number of people on the internet and at conventions and at the main entrance to Avengers Tower who would have given their right hands to have Hawkeye in their living rooms (assuming they couldn’t get Cap, or Iron Man, or Thor, or the Black Widow) drinking their shandy and petting their dog was, indeed, pretty high. 

Looked at that way, it also dramatically lessened the chances Phil would turn him in to… well, to whomever. Anyone, really. 

So, why was it so depressing to realize that Phil was a fan? That he was willing to continue helping Clint in part (in most?) because he was a pseudo-superhero? Better Phil, competent and calm and most likely quite deadly when called for, than pretty much anyone else whose hands he could have fallen into. 

It was just that Phil had liked Frank Barney, Clint thought. Frank Barney had damn well liked Phil, and it had felt relaxing to be liked just for being him for a little while. And it would have been really nice to know if all those glances and touches were for him… or Hawkeye. Hawkeye was used to glances like that. He didn’t take them seriously anymore-- they came with the territory and weren’t to be trusted for much beyond a nice night or week or maybe month, to stretch it. 

Clint felt the walls start to come up against his will, even as he was coming to the conclusion that he really did need to spill his story to Phil. 

_It’d be nice to be Frank Barney for just a little while longer._

“You can be Frank Barney for as long as you need.”

Clint looked up, to find Phil watching him earnestly. Well, at least that was the _only_ part of his thoughts that had slipped out into speech (he hoped). He fought down his own blush, as Phil continued. 

“North Bar’s not going anywhere, and I’m not either,” he said. “And you’re already used to using Frank, so you’re used to responding. We’ll say Frank’s my cousin, here on a visit, when you come to town with me.”

_Wait, what?_

“I’m not going into town! Why the hell would I go into town?”

“Well if you just stay here, we’re never going to figure out what happened to you and clear your name.” 

“‘We’?” Clint realized he was staring at Phil. To be fair, Phil was staring back, his eyes wide and startled, as if he hadn’t expected the words to come out of his own mouth. He drew in a long breath after a moment, straightened his back, and nodded.

“We,” he said firmly.

 

**Two**

 

“So basically,” Phil said, trying to keep the smacking to a minimum as he licked chicken juice off his fingers, “that’s the rumor round up. You’re either dead, or compromised.” His was trying and, he was sure, failing not to feel self-conscious about his table manners, as Clint’s gaze tracked from his fingers to his eyes… and then skittered away.

“Both, ideally, I think,” he said quietly. “If my enemies had their way.”

Phil sighed into his napkin. The tension between the two of them had begun to ebb as the level of alcohol in their hands had gone down, and then further as the oven timer buzzed and they were able to use serving up and sitting down to dinner as distractions. Clearly, though, it had not dissipated completely; _Frank_ would never have avoided meeting his eyes that way. It was probably only to be expected; Phil knew the look of a man who just needed to disappear from his old life for a while-- he’d seen it in the mirror fifteen years gone. 

When Phil had stepped onto the island for the first time-- back on the rotten old dock by the new boathouse-- and his feet had sunk into the soft sand, it was like New York and all the noise and the city and the disappointments had shrunk down against the horizon. The slap of the waves against the pilings still brought him the same unexpected calm in his heart as it had then. Kosovo faded away, and the sting of that honorable discharge he’d acquired against his will. The folded flag that went to the next-of-kin who wasn’t Phil at all, the way the weeks had stretched after the last letter, before the official word came; the months after that when Phil just sort of faded from the life of the city; North Bar had taken everything he'd needed to lay down. Somewhere inside the slither of dune grass and the glint of the sun on the water, the high hard days where the wind tore over the island and off the other side, room had been made for all of Phil, and he’d returned the favor with fierce devotion.

North Bar was treating Clint as well as it had treated him; no wonder Clint was just a little torn about the idea of picking up whatever burdens he’d set down.

Watching him come to that resolution while silhouetted so domestically in Phil’s window had nearly been more than Phil could bear. His entire demeanor changed-- movements becoming more controlled, face shuttering and, somehow, firming. The metamorphosis from the loose, snarky man Frank Barney had been into the hero that Hawkeye was had been breathtaking-- and unexpectedly sad.

Phil had liked Frank.

Phil had liked Frank, he realized as the man disappeared before his eyes, a _lot_. 

He refused, however, to regret that Clint Barton was a braver man than he; a decade and a half on, he had yet to do what Clint was doing now.

Well. What Clint was doing now in regards to picking his life back up; they were both eating the chicken. 

“So,” Clint said, then buttered another ear of corn and took a generous bite. He leaned back as far as the cramped space in the breakfast nook would allow, stretching his free hand along the bench back. “Here’s the thing. After I jumped out of the window at Avengers Tower, I--”

“Wait,” Phil said, and then waited himself until he could continue without squeaking. “Back up-- that is not where you start a story.”

____

“Worth a try,” Clint managed, when he finally stopped chuckling. Across the little table, Phil was trying to glare around his smile and for half a moment, it was all still all right. Only half a moment, before he looked down at his half-empty plate and frowned, suddenly not hungry at all.

Phil must have noticed, because he gently slid the plate out from under Clint’s hands and brought it the few necessary steps to the double sink, along with his own. Clint let him work for a moment, scraping the usable scraps into a big tupperware that lived in the freezer waiting to be made into broth, before he got up.

“We’d just gotten back from an op up in Greenland,” he said, as he set a dry dish towel over his arm and turned on the water, “kind of a weird technical thing, something about a solar flare and an AIM research base on an oil rig-- and it’s getting stunningly easy to mutate creatures these days; Tony could stand to have done a more thorough job taking down AIM, back when he was playing dead for the Mandarin. Not that I have much room to judge, but if he’d followed through we wouldn’t have been in Greenland in the first place.” 

Phil handed off the first plate, and raised an eyebrow at him. Right, time to stop babbling and report, like he’d been itching to do since Phil had gone all drill sergeant on him earlier. _Years of conditioning_. 

“We make it as far as the common rooms and are about to split up-- it's Thor’s turn to carry Banner, but everyone else is headed for our own rooms-- when we notice Agent Amador standing in the middle of the room, and she’s got backup. Now, I know her-- we both served under the same SO-- and she can be a bit rigid, but never like _this_ , and she’s not meeting my eyes.” 

Phil handed him the cast iron pan the scalloped potatoes had been in, and Clint gratefully set it in the rinsing sink and began to scrub, letting the hot water scald his hands. The bristle of the metal pot scrubber distracted him enough from the story that he could go on in a tolerably even tone.

“She mostly ignores the others-- which is a sure way to piss off Steve and Tony-- and turns to me, and she says ‘we’ve heard some rumors, Barton.’”

“That seems unnecessarily rude,” Phil muttered, looking over a glass for spots and then moving to the free sink to wash it, “and counterproductive. You started backing towards the door, didn’t you?” 

“Hell yes, I did.” Clint said, and reached to put the scrubber back. They were so close his arm brushed Phil’s as he did, and the slide of wet skin against his derailed him for a moment. _Crap, no, not now, self. Plenty of time to screw yourself over later._ Sudsy water was streaking down the dark hair on Phil’s arm, which was maybe something Clint paid too much attention to most nights, but this time it required special effort to drag his gaze away and continue:

“Akela’s not usually rude that way so my hackles went up but fast. Went up further when she gave me the old ‘please come with me so we can discuss this in private’ routine. Cap got in front of her then, started arguing back and forth about she could say whatever she had to say in front of all of the Avengers or none of them, but I wasn’t going with her, oh yes I was, oh no I wasn’t. I was close to the door by then.” Putting the cast iron pan back on its hook on the wall let him turn his back to Phil for this next part. Lucky looked up from his food dish below to wink and whine at Clint for getting in his way.

“Finally, she gives in and explains,” he continued. “SHIELD’s been gathering intel and running ops against this group called Project Centipede for a while. They… I guess they cropped up after the Battle of New York-- lots of little groups came in while everything was unsettled. She says they have an interest in Extremis and the Infinity formula, which are-- you know what,” he stopped himself, because those were not his secrets to tell, “they're just things. They wanted. Along with a laundry list of other stuff. Anyway, someone had been passing them secrets and doing espionage on their behalf. Apparently the analysis showed it was me.”

“But… I thought you and Natasha Romanov retired from SHIELD after the fall of the Triskelion,” Phil said, and handed Clint a _Friend of the Harvey Cedars Beach Patrol_ mug, which Clint promptly hung on the mug rack behind him.

“We did, but I guess they thought I was using my old access to hack in or something. I didn’t follow it all. Anyway, Tony demands the intel, and Amador hands it to him on a tablet, and he starts throwing it up everywhere and babbling--”

“I’m sorry, he what?” Phil asked, and Clint turned to find him looking bewildered, the last plate forgotten in his hands. Clint rewound his last sentence.

“Oh. He’s… got holographic projection capabilities basically all over. So he kind of… throws…” Clint tried to demonstrate with his own hands, feeling ridiculously theatrical about it, since no blue glowing boxes were appearing beneath his fingers. “Anyway, he throws them up and starts reading them and just getting more and more agitated, and Thor puts Bruce down so he can come over and look, and Steve and Nat follow… Amador adds that Fury had been expecting this and….”

“That’s when you made a break for it,” Phil said with a sigh, as if he perfectly understood but didn’t consider it to be the only natural course of action-- which it clearly was.

“That’s when I make a break for it. Amador’s backup is kind of expecting it, but they’re also kind of confused by Tony, so I take them down, and one of them lands on Bruce. And that wakes _him_ up and while everyone’s waiting to see if he’ll Hulk out, I’m out of the room, anyway. And I take the quickest way down out of the Tower.”

“By jumping out of a window.”

“Precisely,” Clint said, and shrugged. “After that, it was the normal hide-and-seek and pull the tracker out of my arm, grab the closest of my stashed go-bags and scram. Pulled on any loose thread I could find in Amador's story, and ended up on Quinn's yacht chasing down a possibility. Which went so well I half-drowned and washed up on your beach.” And then he closed his eyes and leaned back against the counter, because he suddenly felt absolutely _exhausted_ and his throat was protesting all the talking. 

After a moment, he felt a hand alight on his shoulder.

“It was a really idiotic thing to do,” Phil said quietly. Clint opened his eyes, to find Phil’s eyes all shiny, at odds with his words. 

“Phil,” Clint tried out a dry smile, which only half stuck, and looked down. “Do you know what they do to traitors at SHIELD? Especially now, after they only barely survived HYDRA? It’s not pretty, it doesn’t involve a jury of your peers, and it’s exponentially harder to escape from than Avengers Tower is.”

“But Clint,” Phil squeezed his shoulder until Clint looked back over at him. “You’re not a traitor.”

Clint wanted to look away, he really did. He knew he was flushing at the fucking admiration that was riding in Phil’s eyes, all mixed in with that sad fond earnest look he’d had all day. He was planning on looking away any moment now.

He just didn’t think he could move. 

“No,” he said eventually, the word floating out as he let his lips drop open. “No, I’m not. I just… it’s got so I believe it myself, I guess.” 

Phil looked away now, skin reddening under his scruff, and shrugged. 

“I’m guessing it wouldn’t make much of a difference, once you were in SHIELD custody, whether or not you were being framed. You'd still be helpless. Sorry, it was a silly thing to say.”

“Wasn’t,” Clint said, and it was astonishing how gruff his voice had gone, like he had a burr lodged under his adam’s apple. “Turns out I needed to hear it.”

 

**Three**

 

“Don’t I need a ball cap or something?” Clint asked, staring at his face in the streaky mirror next to the cottage’s front door, and running his hands down the sides of the jeans he’d borrowed from Phil. Clint had agreed easily enough at the time, but now that they were ready to actually leave for Gansett Light, Phil could see the skittishness return, and he was sympathetic. Phil himself was more than half uncertain. Several weeks of living rough and razorless, plus nearly drowning, had transformed Clint in a lot of ways. That Phil couldn't look at the man's broad shoulders, agile hands, and sharp eyes and not see _Clint Barton_ anymore, even when he wanted to see _Frank Barney_ , meant nothing. 

“Not after dark, no,” Phil said, “unless you want everyone to think there’s something wrong with you. Beard’s growing in well, though.”

“Hrmph,” Clint said, and rubbed his knuckles against his jawline before shifting again in his borrowed flannel shirt, rolling and re-rolling the cuffs. He’d come out of the guest bedroom-- which Phil had cleared out for him shortly after it became clear he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon-- in that outfit and Phil’d had to turn away and gather himself. It fit just a little _too_ well across shoulders, biceps, hips, thighs, in ways that the lounging gear and baggy t-shirts he’d been living in did not. Use had gradually allowed Phil to control the way his body reacted to Frank Barney; clearly he was going to have to redouble his efforts with Clint Barton. "Well I don't want people to think there's something wrong with me, either."

_And this is the man who jumped out of Avengers Tower, hid himself so well that the combined forces of half the alphabet agencies on the East Coast couldn’t flush him out, fought his way out of an interrogation while wearing only his boxers, and survived falling overboard in the middle of a storm. This is an Avenger. In my house. Worried about whether my friends will like him._

Well, perhaps not whether they’d like him so much as whether they'd fail to recognize him. Making friends probably came naturally to Clint, if the way he’d so-casually inserted himself into Phil’s life was any indication. He hadn’t washed ashore in a storm, he _was_ the storm, and Phil had been stupid not to see it from the first.

_If I’d known back then, when I first found him, would I have done any of this differently?_

Once on the yacht, Clint had told him as they went over his story in detail, he’d been spotted and captured by Quinn’s men and knocked out. Woken up tied to a chair nearly naked, and then been interrogated. He’d gotten himself free, and then gotten himself both shot and knocked overboard. Or so he assumed-- he truly didn’t remember the last part. Not that long ago, he’d been lying battered, broken, and nearly drowned on Phil’s shore, and here he was in Phil’s hand-me-downs, warm and safe and no, no Phil could not see that he would have done anything differently. There were no forks in that road.

“Hey boy,” Clint said, as Lucky wound around his legs and whined. He knew shore-going rig when he saw it, and when it happened in the evening it generally meant no Luckies were going to be included in the expedition. He’d long since stopped trying to convince Phil that he deserved to be taken along; clearly he was going to try Clint now. “You hold down the fort,” Clint told him, ruffling his ears before bending down to bury his nose in fur for a moment. “And keep the chickens safe. They’re kinda feather-brained.”

Oh, hell. 

How was Phil supposed to be calm and collected in the face of that?

 _What in the world happened, to make that man there think he had no one to rely on but himself?_ Disappointment was supposed to be for the Phils of the world, that he was used to. You pick up, brush yourself off, soldier on. Self-reliance was made for people like him: competent, self-contained, and unremarkable. A man as exceptional as Hawkeye should have had _someone_ out there he could turn to. 

Well. Now he had Phil. Because… because Phil had _said_ so, was why.

“Come on, Cousin Frank,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t sound as gruff to Clint as it did in his own ears. Clint looked up at him, took a deep breath, and straightened his shoulders. “Let’s go to town.”

He only hoped he’d be help enough.

 

**Four**

 

The scruffy salty Keeper of North Bar was back, standing at the bar, and he’d brought a lumberjack with him. 

Skye’d nearly walked smack into Table 10 when they came through the door. Because _whoa_. The dude was built like an action figure only sized up, and he moved with an easy friendly lope that made her want to drape herself over him. He was on his way to being as bountifully bearded as his companion, and she wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t going to douse himself in maple syrup and start singing “I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay” just _because_. Where the hell did he think he was, Maine? This wasn't Maine, this was the Jersey Shore, where was his backwards ballcap? The guy darted his head to look behind himself, just for a second, and Skye turned away. ‘Cause either he was truly pissed off at the world or hiding some extreme social anxiety-- he was scowling like a wet owl. 

Anyway, she liked her guys long and lean and dark haired, and ideally nerdy. Also a decade closer to her own age. It was just hard not to admire a figure like that. Even if he looked kinda pale, on second glance. Sickly.

The important part, anyway, was that Phil Coulson was with him, and introducing him to Tom. And, if the way Wanda Jackson was pulling at the back of Skye’s shirt to get her attention was any indication, the town had noticed.

“Whozzat?” Wanda asked her urgently, and Skye shrugged. They found out a minute or two later, while Skye was still picking up plates, when Tom came over to the table with Phil under one arm and the scruffy dude-- looking less lumberjacky and more special ops up close-- under the other. 

“Wanda, have you met Phil’s cousin Frank?” Tom asked, and Wanda simpered that _any friend of Phil’s_ , and _Phil never mentioned a cousin_ , and held out her hand.

“My fault,” said Cousin Frank, taking the proffered hand and squeezing. “Or maybe the family’s fault. My parents always believed in familial harmony through isolation. Luckily, Phil here doesn’t feel the same way.” And then he smiled, and Skye reminded herself firmly that _tall, dark, and brooding-- and no older than 27_ was what she wanted. The smile was… good. Wanda clearly thought so too, she nearly fell off her seat, she shifted her chair so fast to make room for them both.

As Skye removed the plates, Phil described how Frank was at loose ends after his previous job ended abruptly, and Phil had offered to have him come stay a bit, help out after the storm, build some family ties.

They seemed to be settling in for the night, and Skye looked up at the clock, trying hard not to count the minutes, or wonder where her relief was for the evening.

Relief rolled in the back door five minutes later in the guise of America Chavez, but Skye didn’t have a lot of time to appreciate it just then, because over at Table 10, Kate Bishop was holding forth _again_ , and this time she was shaking a long finger in the direction of Phil Coulson.

“You’re girlfriend’s at it again,” she grumbled at America, who glared at her as she finished tying on her apron.

“Not my girlfriend, chica,” she said. Then she sighed, rolled up her sleeves, and headed over to Table 10, where she laid a gentle hand on Kate’s elbow. Kate turned and went stock still for a long moment, her mouth caught open, stopping in mid-word.

"Play it cool, Princess," America was saying in an even voice as Skye headed for Table 9. Kate nodded at her, still staring.

"America? What?" She finally managed. 

_Yeah, nothing going on there at all_ Skye thought. She arrived at the empty table with her bar rag just as Frank said:

“Phil didn’t mean anything by it,” in a rumbly, soothing tone of voice. 

Kate peeled herself away from America, and all the indignation came rushing back into her manner.

“Sure he didn’t! No one ever _does_. But I was in Manhattan when the Chitauri attacked, and I’m telling you we’d be dead if not for him.”

“And the rest of the Avengers,” Frank supplied, and Skye was fairly certain he was smiling, though it was hard to tell with the way he had his face half buried in his hands.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kate said grudgingly. “But no one’s calling any of _them_ criminals.”

“I wasn’t--” Phil began, but Wanda Jackson’s voice overrode his with a: 

“Now look here, young lady,” before Frank put a hand over each of theirs, and pressed. Wanda stared at him, then at her hand, then at him. Skye couldn’t really blame her.

Phil licked his lips, laughed once to himself, and looked back up.

“It was all idle speculation, Ms. Bishop, and I’m not sure Hawkeye needs you defending him.”

“ _Some_ one has to,” Kate said, crossing her arms.

“Not gonna do you much good here,” Wanda grumped. “If you’d like to take it to the New York Post, or to Congress for that matter, go ahead.” 

America leaned into Kate, cutting off her growl with an urgent whisper.

“This fight’s not worth your time, Princess.” 

“You’re one to talk,” Kate hissed back at her. “And what the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

Meanwhile, Phil had turned to Wanda. “We’ve all got heros, Wanda, I hope. Don’t think I didn’t see how you reacted when Patrick Swayze died. There are worse things than to idolize a genuine superhero.”

“Why _do_ you, though?” Frank drawled at Kate, just when Skye thought things were going to settle down, and Kate turned on him. He gave her a look so guileless Skye was certain he had like three different hidden agendas going on underneath it.

“Why don’t _you_?” she asked. “Look, all the other Avengers have superpowers-- okay, except the Black Widow, kinda, maybe, and it turns out her background is like those Russian gymnasts but with added stabbing. But he was an ex-circus act and he used a paleolithic weapon, right? But it’s the most _beautiful_ weapon, and the things he did with it…” she shrugged, and suddenly looked extremely young. “I’d give anything to be able to do that.” Then she looked up. “He was a normal guy, only he was up there with the big guys, saving the world. You can’t tell me you don’t admire that. We could use a lot more of that, _I_ think. We need a Hawkeye.”

Wanda rolled her eyes a little, but Phil’s glare stopped her from saying anything. Or maybe it was the way America was suddenly looming behind her, snapping:

“Can I get you anything?”

While Wanda was distracted Kate’s indeterminate relative, who’d come back from the bathroom in time to hover ineffectually at their table, slipped in and dragged her back to her seat. America carefully didn’t watch them go, Skye noticed, and skirted wide around their table with her head bowed.

_Well good luck keeping that up for the rest of the night._

Skye dumped her rag in the bucket of dingy water beneath the bar, whipped off her apron, and called to Tom as she sped through the back door:

“Clocking out!”

 

**Five**

 

“We should just come back when it’s light,” Clint said, as he stumbled over yet another tree branch. Ahead of him, silhouetted against the night sky, Phil shook his head.

“No, I’m pretty sure I saw a flash. If something’s come disconnected, we could have a bad fire here quickly,” he responded, and fumbled with the padlock to the gate around the low concrete bunker where the monitoring equipment for the buoy farm was kept. Clint sighed, and shoved his hands in his pockets. 

It had been a long night, and a tense one, as Phil introduced him to what he considered to be the most important members of the Gansett Light community. “Most important” meaning, in this case, “most likely to spread the Cousin Frank backstory widely and with authority.” Clint was fairly certain Wanda Jackson was embellishing Frank’s fairly mundane background-- Army for awhile, then private security overseas, until a medical condition forced him to give it up-- at that very moment. By morning, Frank Barney would be a certified war hero with a tragic past. 

Which was absurd, because hadn’t she noticed North Bar already had one of them, or did she think it needed a pair?

It had been fascinating, though it made him a bit queasy, hearing the many, varied, muddled, occasionally spectacular theories floating around about Hawkeye’s disappearance. Phil had insinuated his own agenda into the conversation remarkably smoothly-- leaning in just a little whenever Atlantic City came up, or being extra dismissive, depending on who he was talking to, casually demanding backup (“at least tell me you snopes'd that one, Ben”) and just generally goading people into talking more than they meant to. 

Clint thought he could understand better now how he’d dropped his defences around Phil so quickly; he clearly wasn’t the only one to have that reaction. And that thought didn’t burn, not at all. Not even a little bit.

The most bewildering part of the night, though, Clint decided-- firmly taking his mind off Phil’s interrogation techniques-- was definitely hearing his archery form and weapon choices praised in the third person by a Manhattan socialite with diamonds in her ears worth at least twice as much as his first bow. An absurd desire to watch her shoot, see what those manicured, close-cropped fingers could do when they were holding a bowstring, bubbled up in him.

“That’s odd,” Phil said, and Clint glanced up. Phil was standing in front of the bunker, gazing down at the reinforced steel door before them. He hadn’t bothered with a flashlight as they picked their way down the beach from the dock where he’d left the skiff (“It’s a nice evening-- let’s see how you handle hauling sheets, Hawkeye,” Phil’d said, and Clint had deliberately ignored the twinkle in his eye for the sake of a quiet life). The moon had been enough, reflected off the ocean and the spotty cloud cover, to turn the path silver and gray as they followed it. They’d come up to the bunker door mostly silently, their footsteps hidden under the background crash of the waves against the seaside walls.

So, Clint guessed, whoever had picked the lock on the door and lit the thin blue light that was showing under the crack, probably had no idea they were outside. He and Phil glanced at each other, and Clint slid back into the shadows with a nod.

It killed him to do so, but he had not yet completely abandoned common sense. It was one thing to pass in the dark of a bar among people who had no reason to suspect a fugitive superhero was in their midst. But if it was Jawbones in the bunker, or someone like him, Clint wouldn’t bet on going unrecognized for long. And Phil was clearly, given the way his shoulders rolled and his stance widened as he went to push the door open, capable of taking care of himself. Especially with the advantage of surprise. _Could take advantage of my-- no. Really not the time._

Phil turned to him with a smile that went slippery in the moonlight, then pushed the door open and stepped through it.

Inside the bunker, several things dropped-- one with a clatter, one with a loud thump, one with a rattle, and another with a cluck. Nothing that sounded like a human body or a weapon, and Clint tensed.

“What the hell are you doing here-- and is that my chicken?” he heard Phil say, and then, just to put a capper on a surreal night, he heard a young woman sigh.

“Okay, this looks bad.” 

Clint was through the door in an instant, heartbeat pounding in his ears, peering over Phil’s shoulder at… Skye, the waitress from the Blue Peter. She was on the ground next to an open packing crate, and there was a scrawny black chicken pecking at her feet.

“I can explain everything,” she said, holding up her hands. 

\----

To be continued....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on Washed Ashore: Skye explains it all; Good Cop, Bad Cop, Chicken Cop; Kate’s frustrated; and Phil shocks everyone.
> 
> Can I just say, faithful readers? You ROCK. All of you. Have a fully-bearded Jeremy Renner [in this week's tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/92380379731/washed-ashore-chapter-5-coming-about-kathar) just for fun.
> 
> Also, never wash a cast iron pan in soapy water. Like Clint, you can use a metal scrubber and hot clear water. Or for even better results, boil some water and baking soda in the pan, then wipe with a damp cloth. Then melt some grease back into the pan to preserve the seasoning.


	6. Good Cop, Bad Cop, Chicken Cop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Impromptu interrogations using chickens, Skye explains it all (eventually), and America’s not impressed with Kate’s avoidance tactics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please make sure you’re sitting comfortably, this is a long one.
> 
> Obligatory chicken note: all chicken interrogation done by trained chicken professionals.

**One**

"I can explain everything," Skye said-- and then winced, because the chicken chose that moment to go for her toe. _I should so have worn the close-toed boat shoes_. Phil Coulson glared down at her, the thin blue light of her LED lamp turning him practically white-pale, except where his beard threw the rest of his face into stark relief. He loomed in the doorway with his hands on his hips, and his shoulders were broad as jetties-- she'd never realized 'til now what working with boats and keeping islands would do to a man's musculature. Now she was forcibly reminded, and man and boy that scruffy hermit look transferred into possibly-homicidal-loner real well.

His cousin rolled up behind him-- and, yes, his shoulders were even bigger and broader, like a friendly blonde bear-- and openly boggled when he caught sight of her. Skye was beginning to feel like she'd wandered into a fairy tale-- Not-so-Goldilocks and the Three Shipping Crates, maybe-- and the bear family had come home early. She smiled weakly back at them both and waggled her fingers a little, then and put on her best big-eyed waif face. _Yeah, I wasn’t expecting_ you _either. Surprise!_

“Hey, she’s alive!” The cousin-- Francis? Frank? Frank-- went from incredulous to gleeful between one moment and the next. He shouldered past Coulson to scoop up the rather dusty, unhappy-looking black hen. 

“Phil didn’t think he was gonna see you again, girl, after the storm. We've been looking all over for you,” he told it, and ruffled it on its little skull. This earned him a beady look and a cluck. Coulson turned to look at him, and something in the determinedly blank cast of his face deflated him from probable-ax-murderer to something not quite benign, but less likely to be actively seeking to kill her. Without good reason, anyway. Frank buried his fingers in the feathers on the chicken's breast, and met the look with one equally blank.

Skye took the opportunity to put her hands down and push to her feet. Kneeling on the concrete floor of a bunker in the dim illumination cast by the little blue lamp, with two big burly men looming over her, was just not gonna fly.

"You should take better care of your chickens," she said, brushing her knees off, hoping some kind of coherent cover story would come to her if she gave it enough time. 

Unfortunately, there were only so many ways you could explain being found in a secured bunker on the edge of an island you have no reason to be on, and the options dwindle even further when you are found in said bunker at sometime past midnight on a Tuesday. Skye'd always prided herself on her ability to talk her way out of anything, extemporaneously. She was a master of babble-babble-scram. But there didn't look to be a way to _scram_ , and neither Coulson nor Frank seemed likely to bother being distracted by babble.

She ran through her options.

"Moonlight stroll" really didn't make sense when you'd had to come by boat-- "Moonlight boat?" "I saw a light on in the concrete bunker and thought I'd check it out?" But what light? What _windows_? Maybe there was a light underneath a crack in the door? _But how were you there to see it, Miss?_ Thought she heard a noise? A scream, maybe? The chicken could have screamed. _Did_ Chickens scream? She found the chicken outside the bunker, and thought maybe that was where it lived? So she picked the lock to let it back in? It had the merit of being partly true, anyway. She _had_ found the chicken outside the bunker, and it _had_ followed her in.

In retrospect, that should have been the first clue that the night wasn't going to go the way she'd thought it would.

A frustrated cluck followed by a muffled yelp brought Skye up short-- the chicken had clearly tired of being fawned over by Frank, and had pecked at his hand. He wrung out the violated appendage and glared down at the bird in brief outrage.

Skye'd been caught more than once in her life, sure, and the people who'd caught her had sometimes been stupid, sometimes brutally dangerous, once in a while a combination, and she'd been able to keep on top of the situation-- or at any rate ahead of disaster-- each time. But this was the first time she could remember being in a situation this _ridiculous_ as well as frightening. Each moment was leaving her less sure of her own footing.

"Save it for the girl," Frank told the hen, when it bawked and looked away. "You can take all your chicken rage out on her if she doesn't cooperate."

"I never said I wouldn't cooperate!" Skye yelped, "You've got to ask me something first!"

Coulson, cousin, and chicken all turned identical looks of skepticism on Skye, and she gulped. 

____

Phil could already feel the headache building behind his temples like pressure changing on the front of a storm, ominous little throbs that were going to turn into the full-blown event if the evening kept going the way it was. The situation was absurd on the face of it: two fully-grown men and a chicken, facing down a young woman who'd broken into a secure bunker armed only with a miniature LED bluelight and improper footwear. Except, of course, that one of those men was on the lam, the other was hiding him, and the crates the girl had been digging in had washed up off the same boat that the fugitive in question had been thrown from. 

Of the three of them-- no, four, counting the chicken, and from the way Clint was clearly set on fawning over with it, the chicken counted-- the girl was currently the most dangerous. Because Phil wasn't willing to do anything... permanent... to her, and it wasn't at all likely _Hawkeye_ was going to be arguing with him about that. Whereas, if she once guessed who the big, friendly, scruffy guy cradling a skinny chicken was, she held all their fates in her hands. 

Phil had been in worse places, actually. There'd been one time, in a cheesemaker's cave just east of Orlat, somewhere none of them were even remotely supposed to be (yet-- the rest of the Rangers would get there in time, after Phil had left the Army for good). Just him, his pals-- so-called, given the things they'd gotten him into-- a local girl, a large number of goats, and a delegation from the KLA that also wasn't supposed to be there.

There had been a chicken that time, too.

It... hadn't gone well for anyone involved-- especially the cheesemaker. Phil still winced at the term "inter-agency cooperation."

Avoiding a similar outcome this time was going to depend heavily on the girl, and why she was _here_ at all.  
The girl in question had twisted her hands in the loose ends of her oversized open plaid shirt, and was staring him down. As if he couldn't _see_ the desperate way her brain was scrambling behind her dark pupils. Compared to their last illicit visitor, she had absolutely no plausible cover story, no deniability, but clearly she was going to try anyway.

The bravado was actually more than a little endearing. He really hoped this wasn't going to turn into another Orlat. 

“You were explaining everything,” Phil reminded her, glaring.

“Yeah, I, um, I was out for a moonlight--”

It was going to be like Orlat.

“Okay, can we not?” Clint asked, and moved around her. The move, and the question, startled Phil, but he left Clint to it; he seemed to have a plan in mind, and just at the moment Phil very profoundly did not. Of the two of them Phil was _not_ the one with recent experience in interrogations.

Unless you counted the annual appropriations hearings in front of the Gansett Light town council. Or, on that tip, the annual budgetary justifications for North Bar, made in front of Pepper Potts. Or really _any_ meeting of the Long Beach Island Preservation Society. 

But none of these were in the same league as midnight interrogations with possible spies-- even if it sometimes felt that way. The stakes were far higher than the continuing appropriations for the Spotted Knapweed Eradication Fund. Clint's life and good name, and very possibly Phil's, rested on this. Something else, too, was out there in the murky deep they were still floating over. The information so far suggested little more than a plot to defame an Avenger, but Phil's hackles had gone up and stayed up ever since Clint had told his story a few days ago. 

First Jawbones, now Skye. The lurkers Doc Halliday had mentioned skulking around Gansett Light asking their questions and leaving, so soon after Clint had gone overboard. Their little isolated world was cracking a bit at the seams-- which was why he'd insisted on bringing Clint to town, starting to build a cover story. It was time to get ahead of the storm, he'd felt. But this girl, here, now, meant nothing but trouble. 

At least _Hawkeye_ seemed unphased, so maybe Phil was making too much of it. 

Clint walked over to the far end of the bunker where several swivel chairs sat gathering dust next to a plastic-shrouded bank of instruments, pulled one out, and set the chicken on it. He spun a second around and sat down backwards, leaning over the back. After a moment, he gave the chicken a thoughtful glance, then turned her to face Skye. They watched her for the space of several long breaths, Clint bland and benign, the chicken highly skeptical.

“Have a seat,” Clint said finally, and gestured at the crates stacked up behind the girl. Skye looked at the crate, then him, then Phil, who raised an eyebrow at her. He didn't pretend to know where Clint was going with this, but the very purposeful way Clint was ignoring him gave him all the cue he needed. He cracked his neck and resettled himself so that he took up just a little more space in the doorway, his jaw set just a little tighter.

Skye sat.

Phil leaned against the door.

She stiffened, he was pleased to notice. Good.

“Go on,” he said, and she opened her mouth, her eyes shifting quickly, clearly ready to lie again.

At this rate, it was going to be a long, weird night.

____

 _You've got to admire the girl's guts,_ Clint thought, as Skye-the-waitress opened her mouth to lie again.

He'd been there, very _literally_ been there, caught beyond any hope of maintaining a plausible cover story but determined to brazen it out for as long as possible. Over the years, he'd perfected the art of the _implausible_ cover story, the one that started out unbelieveable and escalated through increasing degrees of bizarreness, until finally winding up in ludicrous territory. Not that it was usually allowed to _get_ there, he either got rescued or the beatings started long before that, but once... just _once_ he'd like to get the chance.

Meanwhile, if she once got started, they were going to be there all night. 

“No, really, no,” he said, and she snapped her mouth shut and looked confused. “I mean, not that I’m not interested in whatever you're about to make up, because I’m supposed to be, it’s supposed to be very revealing-- or so I hear-- but we’d be here forever and not get to the damned point, and I’m tired and my colleague here," he nodded at the chicken, "needs to get back to her coop. She's out past curfew. So let's skip it, okay? What did you want with the boxes, Skye?”

She bit her lip, looked at him, then turned to glance back at Phil, who merely shifted against the door, shrugged, and nodded her back to Clint. Clint crossed his arms over the back of the chair and smiled at her, letting just a little of the gratitude building beneath his ribs bleed into the expression. The man had taken Clint's lead as if they'd been in dozens of interrogations together, and he'd perfected polite-yet-menacing to a degree that Clint didn't think he'd ever seen anyone except Agent Blake manage. Felix Blake, rest whatever passed for his soul, used to have this way of signalling _you're going to break eventually, so just do it now so that I can get home and watch Law and Order, because I haven't seen this one before and I hate getting blood underneath my fingernails_ that was entirely absent from Phil. 

Phil's line was more _this is very disappointing behavior from you, you're better than this, I hope you will make good choices soon before I am forced to take steps_ , and Clint knew from recent personal experience that it was insanely effective. He turned back to Skye, who had gone from staring at them to watching the chicken.

Clint carefully didn't glance at the bird; his peripheral vision was more than good enough to see that she was performing her part to perfection, sitting very still and looking opaque and mysterious.

And he was never gonna tell anyone where he'd gotten the inspiration for that.

Skye was still searching desperately for a foothold on reality here, and not getting one. She was brave but she wasn't used to this, hadn't learned to just take the leap and go with the insanity. Any minute now her brain was going to break. And when she broke, ten to one it was gonna be the chicken that did it.

This, also, was familiar to Clint.

____

They didn’t actually seem like bad people, was the thing.

Skye'd met, been captured by, and taken down the global money laundering empires of a bad guy or two in her time, and she'd met about ten times that many thoroughly mediocre people caught in bad situations.

These guys? Didn't fit into any of the right molds.

Oh sure, they had the crates, and obviously intentionally hid them, but neither of them looked like Ian Quinn’s thugs. Coulson, now, up until she’d _met_ the guy, the smuggling hypothesis had made sense. North Bar was the kind of place you’d expect Quinn to use for out-of-the-way deliveries. Once she'd seen him being all gruff and lonesome at the bar with Tom, a few cracks began to appear in the theory. He was just... he was just... nice. And tragic. And scruffy. And really _not_ who'd she'd imagined he would be. However, being a half-hermit half-volunteer rescue hero didn't make him necessarily a saint-- not even owning _chickens_ made him a saint. 

Then again, there was the state of the crates. As battered and water-stained as the missing crates were, it was as likely than not that they hadn't been delivered to him on purpose. Half the crates in the bunker, mostly the wooden ones, were battered or bashed, their contents gone entirely. The weird-ass gray waterproof ones, though, those appeared designed to float, and they were largely intact. If Coulson hadn’t taken delivery of them, they must have washed ashore during the storm. Then again, surely someone on the up-and-up would have reported the existence of the crates to someone by now? As near as Skye could tell-- and she had kept track, just to be thorough-- he hadn’t so much as pinged the local Craigslist. 

And if he'd reported it to Quinn's company she _would_ have heard about it; she’d wormed more than far enough into his systems for that. Well, his legitimate systems. If she’d been in his illegitimate systems, she wouldn’t have had to _be_ here digging into a shipment that should never have been on his yacht in the first place, and had clearly gotten lost since then. A shipment into which she’d made sure someone in an anonymous warehouse halfway across the world had placed a completely innocuous-looking cellphone whose hardware profile she knew intimately.

So maybe he was planning on keeping them? As an alternative hypothesis, it wasn’t a bad one. Maybe he was some kind of unaffiliated salvage guy, or wanted to see what was in them first? It would explain part of the general air of doom and vituperation he was radiating behind her. _Woohoo, bearded smuggler and his scruffy smuggling cousin. Wow, imagination, you’re just dredging up_ all _the cliches, aren’t you?_

Anyway, they hadn't so much as opened a single crate, yet. That kind of procrastination seemed unlikely.

 _But I’ll install Vista on my laptop if it turns out they’re not hiding_ something.

If not the crates themselves, then what? 

_Cluck!_ went the chicken, and _cough_ went Frank Barney, and Skye glanced back from the chicken to the man, to his sinewy, strong forearms and his mild gaze behind that blonde beard.

Frank Barney, who’d come to the island… when? Before the storm or after? Or _during_? Coulson hadn’t said. Frank Barney, the cousin that no-one on the island had heard of before, that Coulson himself had supposedly met only a couple times, down in Georgia and up in New York. Which was a funny thing to know about another person's relationship with their cousin quite so quickly-- Coulson had been making a point (in that completely unpointed way he had) of feeding the locals Frank’s background. _Assumed_ background. That could just be because the locals were largely insular gossips, and he wanted to avoid rampant speculation.

Then again... why did he want to avoid it? What was he hiding?

Skye looked at the crates. 

Then at Frank Barney.

And the chicken.

And back at Coulson.

One other thing had washed off Ian Quinn’s yacht in the storm, if you believed the tabloids.

Skye didn't, but she had to admit that the chatter on law enforcement channels, and on Ian Quinn's personal and company computers, had been really _really_ thick for a few days after the storm, and a name kept coming up, a name that Quinn kept trying to _keep_ from keeping up. One that everyone assumed had to be dead, if he'd really been on board, really washed off. 

Had to be as battered and bruised and unlikely to have survived as those crates over there.

Except maybe....

“Holy shit,” the words were out before she could stop them, “you’re Hawkeye!”

For a long moment, no one moved.

Except the chicken, which tilted its head at her.

Then Coulson stepped to the side of the door, and threw the bolt.

 

**Two**

 

Moonlight streaked the ocean silver nearly up against the pilings at the bottom of the Blue Peter’s dock, and Kate Bishop imagined herself stepping out onto it, like a road, for one brief, hallucinatory moment. Perhaps, somewhere, that was even possible.

Maybe she should ask America.

No, America was who she’d come out here to avoid. She’d felt the girl’s dark-eyed gaze on her all night, even when she was back in the kitchen or across the restaurant entirely.

They hadn’t spoken after Kate had nearly taken the heads off still more locals, and Cousin Emily had dragged Kate back to her seat and her crabcakes. (The crabcakes provided at least some consolation for the rest of the evening; Kate gorged herself on them and the side-eye Emily gave her when she ordered extras to take home just made it all better.) 

There'd only been America's eyes just leaving hers, whenever she turned to look, or America going out of her way to drift past Kate's table on the way across the room. Finally the whole avoiding-not-avoiding thing had become stupid enough that Kate’d used the excuse of a bathroom break to slip out onto the deserted deck, and then down the steps to the beach below.

She just needed a breath, just _one_ moment without anyone’s eyes-- stupidly long-lashed or not-- on her.  
Bad enough her Dad had decided she needed a keeper, after “that immature, reckless, attention-seeking stunt” she’d pulled at the Met gala in front of Dad and all his expensive friends. Now _America_ thought she needed minding, too?

She’d thought America trusted her better than that.

After everything they'd wanted to do together.... as a team. Together as a team.

Perhaps it was that sense of being tethered, so hobbled she’d chew off a limb to get free if she could figure out how, that had led to her punching out a local the other night, and nearly taking off the heads of two more tonight. She was really making a _great_ impression. It was hard to bring herself to care if everyone hated her, just at the moment.

_Yeah, fuck that. Why am I the only one who sees it? No one understands what it’s gonna be like with Hawkeye down. Sure, yeah, they can maybe find other superheroes, or make them, or whatever they do. But if the bad guys get away with taking down Hawkeye, are any of the rest of the Avengers safe?_

Anyway, if the Avengers _did_ get a replacement-- and the news stories all said they might soon-- he or she wouldn’t be anywhere near as amazing as Hawkeye had been. And they wouldn't be using a bow. 

And that? Was a _travesty_.

Emily was right, though, much as Kate hated to admit it. She was gonna have to learn to ignore that Wanda Jackson-- and Jamie-the-jerk, and Phil-with-the-stupid-beard, and anyone else-- because she didn’t actually want to get kicked out of the Blue Peter for good, and she had no illusions that couldn’t happen.

It wouldn’t. She’d get herself under control. She’d only _think_ about how much she despised them all.

After all, there was no place else with crabcakes like that.

Or with America.

 _Gah. Focus, Kate, damnit. You need to control yourself, not do that._ The wood of the piling was both slimy and splintery, but Kate bopped her forehead against it all the same.

“Gonna mess your makeup, Princess.” 

America was standing, arms akimbo, on the stairs leading down from the restaurant’s deck. The curve of her hips was only accentuated by the stupid little waiter’s apron she was wearing, and her curls snaked around her neck in the breeze. Kate had a moment's really stupid urge to reach out and pull something-- waist, apron ties, curls, it didn't much matter.

“Like anyone’s going to care around here,” Kate replied, and crossed her own arms, trying to project all the righteous indignation that had been simmering in her chest all night, turning her restless.

“Your Tia’s gonna care, especially if you stay away long enough. Gonna wonder what you’re getting up to.” 

She’d come closer now, nearly off the steps, and she was smiling a little.

“She’s my cousin, not my aunt, America, and her name’s Emily.” Kate glared. “And as long as I’m not inside getting into fights, she’s not going to care who or what I’m with.”

“Isn’t she?” There was a smile forming at the corner of America’s lips, and Kate wanted to punch it off her face. Not like America would _let_ her.

“Why are you _here_?” Kate asked, and hated the whine that crept into her own voice. _You brought this on yourself, Kate, so woman up_. America shrugged, and for half a moment Kate thought she ducked her head. But America didn’t do shit like that.

“Because you are,” she said, as if it ought to have been self-explanatory.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Who the hell did she think she was, anyway, coming after Kate? There was no _reason_ for it, nothing Kate could point to having done that would suggest she deserved _this_ special brand of torture.

But better America, right, than Billy and Teddy, or Eli, or any of the others? Who’d been counting on her _not_ to go off on her own and be an idiot. _We were supposed to be a team, right?_ Right. Some team. _You’re the one who made them let you join, and then you did this, so suck it up, girl. You got what you deserve._

“No,” America’s voice pulled her back to the present, to the moonlight and the shadow and the stinging air and the crash and rustle of waves creeping up the beach. “ _You_ shouldn’t be here, Princess. I came to take you home.”

 _And it had needed only that,_ Kate thought, and resisted the urge to pound her head against the piling again.

“I can't. I’d only get you all in trouble,” she said. 

“You’re not responsible for all of us, Princess, and you need to stop trying. You’re miserable here already-- were you even in town for an hour before you punched someone in the nose?”

Aw, shit, America’d seen that? Kate felt juvenile about it enough already.

“He deserved it.” She hoped the heat in her voice hid the blush creeping up her neck, or at least gave it a different meaning. “Dad can exile me if he wants, but he can’t shut me up completely.” He could, though, was the thing. Because what he’d threatened to do to her friends, he could certainly follow through with if she messed this up too bad. And there was no one so likely as America to make her do that-- unless it was her own self. “I didn’t ask you to come, anyway, and I don’t need your help.”

America shifted forward, eyebrows drawing in, beginning to reach out, and Kate braced herself, because she was pretty sure she was about to be shaken.

Footsteps on the deck above stopped them.

“Chavez! Break’s over-- Table 8 is about to mutiny! Get yourself up here, girl! Thanks to Skye, you’re my only coverage tonight!” Tom’s voice rang out over the water and America pulled back, cursing.

“We’ll talk later, Princess,” she said, and was gone before Kate could even open her mouth to snap _there’s nothing to talk about._

Which there wasn’t. And Kate wouldn’t. And if America thought different, she could stuff her… stuff her… just _stuff it_.

 

**Three**

 

Clint and Skye both glanced over at Phil when the bolt slid home, and he let a smile crack his face. The girl blanched, and the thin light of the LED turned her face blue as the blood left it. He didn't dare look straight at Clint, but thought the man looked a little stunned as well. _Haven't lost my sense of timing entirely. Thank you, Dr. Halliday, and Long Beach Island Preservation Society._ Satisfaction followed that thought, and the girl shrank into herself a little more. Clint rustled; only the chicken seemed unaffected.

"I'm right, though, aren't I?" Skye said as the silence stretched, and she tore her eyes from Phil and looked back at Clint. Her voice was steady and light, as if she were only curious, and nothing hung on the answer. "You're Hawkeye, and you really were on Quinn's yacht with... with all this stuff." She gestured to the crates strewn around her, and Phil thought her hand shook a little.

"I am," Clint said, and she nodded, visibly processing the implications as she did. He seemed inclined to give her the time she needed. Phil wasn't going to second-guess him, though his stomach sank briefly as he realized that if she had an accomplice, if she was trying to buy time, they were more or less completely screwed.

Hidden accomplices didn't seem to be her style, but then he'd met her exactly once before this. At the time he'd thought very little about her except that she was kind of nosy-- which was pretty much a requirement for working at the Blue Peter, anyway.

"Did you know?" She asked finally, and gestured at the crates that surrounded her. Clint tilted his head, and the chicken blinked at her. "What Quinn has in these?" She clarified.

"Do you? Wait-- have you been tracking them?" Clint said, and sat back a little. He very carefully did not glance at Phil, who very carefully did not glance at the crates, even as his heart sank into his boots.

Shit. _Shit_. When he'd pulled them into the bunker-- the best he could do on short notice, when he had a mansion to care for, a wounded man on his couch, missing chickens, and an injured power plant-- it had never occurred to him to check for tracking devices of any sort. First of all, why would there be tracking devices? Secondly, why would it matter if they were tracked? He'd just give them back if someone came looking for them. It wasn't like he'd known he was harboring a fugitive superhero. 

_You knew you were harboring_ something _, Phil, you were careless._ Was this why Jawbones (to use Clint's name) had shown up at their door? But if so-- why hadn't he started out down by the bunker? _I should have just shoved the damn things back out with the tide._

"Yeah. Yeah, I was." Skye looked closely at Clint, her eyes narrowed. "You _didn't_ know."

"I ended up on Quinn's yacht more or less by accident." Clint shrugged. "Less, mostly." He looked up at Phil, who gave him the best _don’t look at me_ face he could muster. It was the truth, basically, at least as far as Clint had told Phil. Was that what he wanted, permission to tell the truth? Or permission to tell _all_ of the truth? It wasn't Phil's to give, so far as he could figure. "Do _you_ know what Quinn's been up to, Skye?"

Skye wrinkled her nose.

"I have my suspicions," she said, then heaved a sigh and looked from Clint to the chicken. She seemed awfully distracted by the bird, Phil thought. It was a perfectly ordinary black chicken, somewhat emaciated and really dirty, but aside from the fact it was taking part in an interrogation, there was nothing special about it. Nevertheless, she held the chicken’s gaze for a long moment before flicking her eyes back to Clint, then to Phil-- who met her with what he hoped was a blank face-- and back to the chicken, who clucked at her. 

It was the chicken that seemed to decide it in the end. 

If only the chicken in Orlat had been so helpful.

"God. I'm an idiot." Skye scrubbed her face with her hands and looked back up. "As if an Avenger is going to be working with _him_. Especially one with a friend who's a chicken." There was a brief pause, as Skye did a double-take at the chicken. "That _is_ just a chicken, right? Not... not some shape-shifting superhero?"

Clint cracked up. 

Both the chicken and Skye watched him, with identically incredulous looks on their faces. Phil was glad no one was paying attention to him, because he knew he was biting his lip hard. What else his face might be doing, he really didn't want to know.

There was nothing, _nothing_ that he'd encountered in decades that could compare to seeing Clint Barton fall apart laughing, his eyes closed, squeaks emanating from him, chest heaving as he fought for breath, entire body shaking.

"Ooooooh," Clint said at last, a happy sigh, and looked back up at Skye.

"Okay, fine, that was a stupid question," she huffed, but the atmosphere in the bunker had changed completely in the few minutes in which Clint had been prostrate with laughter. Skye'd uncurled, and seemed to be kind of melty at the edges all of a sudden-- Phil diagnosed a combination of exhaustion, relief, worry, and helpless attraction. He was sympathetic; it was a reaction he'd become intimately familiar with.

"Skye, is Quinn tracking these crates?" he asked, and she shot around to stare at him like she'd forgotten he was around. _Typical._

"No, or they'd be gone by now," she told him. "And maybe you with them."

"But he could track them if he wanted to."

"Not anymore," she said, with evident satisfaction. "Not since you put the crates in here; this bunker may as well not exist as far as any kind of wireless or satellite signals are concerned. It's fascinating. They must have been lying on the beach a while before you dragged them in here?" He nodded, and she beckoned them over to one of the brushed gray crates. "Lucky for me," she said. "Anyway, the device I had planted is in here. These ones are waterproof; they carry hard drives and other devices he was shipping. He had them all deactivated to get through customs. But before he did, I managed to hack into one so I could turn it on remotely."

"You can do that?" Clint asked, and Skye shrugged.

"The NSA can. I just made them want to do it, and followed along."

"If we take these out of the bunker, the NSA can track these crates now?" Phil asked, pushing off from the wall.

"No," Skye rolled her eyes. "I'm not that stupid. I pulled the entire profile off their database as soon as I found out where it was."

"Still," Clint said quietly, "I'd prefer that device end up in the sea. Quickly."

"Then they'd know we know," Phil said, and shook his head. "And that we don't want them to know. We've already had one person come looking for them." Jawbones, of course, and Clint's eyes narrowed and became icy as he caught the reference. Clint was never going to forgive the tranq'ing of Lucky. Not that Phil blamed him. "Now that they're here, they have to stay here. Unless," he turned to Skye, "you can help us take the rest off the grid."

"Probably," she said, "if it'll get me a look inside."

"You don't know what's in these?" Clint stood up. The chicken stared at him and gave a dissatisfied cluck.

"Duh, no, or I wouldn't have had to do this. I mean, I know what I put in them-- had put in them, whatever-- but not where they were going or what else they were carrying. That's the _point_ of all this," she glared at Clint. "I know Quinn's up to something really dirty, and I know he's been using _my_ people to help him out, and I want to know what's going on and why. And I bet that's why you were on his yacht, too, wasn't it, superhero dude?"

"Mostly," Clint said, and Phil snorted. "SHIELD thought I had something going either with Quinn or against him. Since I don't know him from Adam, I figured I'd explore. Apparently he knew I was coming, and arranged for a welcoming committee." 

Which Phil could have told him would happen, had Phil been around to ask. Quinn had practically sent him an engraved invitation. (To Clint's credit, he'd been sheepish when he'd told all this to Phil. He'd also been operating on three candy bars and about four hours of sleep in the last 48 when he'd made the decision. Phil'd figured that excused a lot; Clint had muttered that he'd "gotten soft.")

"Who're 'your people,' Skye?" Phil asked quietly, to bring them back to the present matter, and she hunched back up.

"Ah, um, okay. I guess you guys deserve that." She straightened, and pride leached into her voice even though Phil could tell she was bracing herself as she said it. "I'm one of the leaders of the Rising Tide."

There was silence for a moment.

"The what now?" Clint said at last.

 

**Four**

 

The Rising Tide, as Skye explained it while they picked their way back to the cottage over the moonlit sand dunes, was a "social justice hacktivist group." She seemed a little put out that Clint hadn't heard of them, since they'd been "real active after the Battle of New York, holding SHIELD and other shady organizations accountable and showing the world what they don't want us to know."

"Like how we'd been infiltrated by HYDRA?" Clint asked cheerfully-- which was warning enough for both them and the chicken, who tensed in his arms.

"Okay, so we missed that one," she grumbled. "To be fair...."

"... so did everyone," Clint finished for her.

"Except Stark," she said, and looked back up at him. "How did _he_ figure it out?"

"Well first of all, Tony Stark is a paranoid bastard," Clint said. “Second of all, he has JARVIS. He hacked into SHIELD’s servers on the Helicarrier back when everything was going down just before the Chitauri came through. Got more data than he needed, and sent it off to his AI. Then everyone got a little distracted by an alien invasion. 

"He went back to it after, though, 'cause he still didn't much trust SHIELD. You can’t blame the guy, given that he’d just nearly died because SHIELD’s oversight committee tried to nuke Manhattan. I don't know exactly what he found, but whatever it was worried the fuck out of him. After the Mandarin blew up his home, and all the shit that followed, he gave up trying to figure it out on his lonesome. So he took the data to Fury, told him he had _some_ kinda problem in his house, and to clean it up pronto. That’s the short of it. The long is… too long for tonight, and anyway you can watch the Senate hearings to get an idea. But Tony’s a paranoid bastard and I love him for it. God knows what would have happened if he hadn’t sabotaged Project Insight.”

“Was that at Fury’s direction?” Phil asked, wishing he’d paid more attention to the Senate hearings at the time. He’d watched when his employer was on but, like every Stark Industries employee, he’d been extraordinarily busy that spring. He and half the other high-level site directors had been called on to help Ms. Potts re-do security measures from the ground up-- which was when the bunker had acquired its invisibility to wireless and satellite. All things considered, he felt that Clint’s “paranoid bastard” diagnosis was generous.

“It was, yeah,” Clint said. “Because no one’s a paranoider bastard than Fury. And fuck knows he wasn’t wrong. Anyway,” he turned to Skye, “I expect I’d have heard about the Rising Tide if I’d needed to, but we were a little busy cleaning our own house. That’s not bad, though! I mean, if the point is to take down the Man, a low profile is maybe a good thing. Right?”

Skye grunted, and even in the moonlight Phil could tell she was sliding a little bit towards mutinous. He didn’t blame her; he was about to crawl out of his skin, and he thought Clint was too. They'd each spilled out far too much to easily process already, and it was after midnight and past time they were… ah.

“We’re home,” Phil said, sighing with satisfaction as the cottage hove into sight at the end of the path. “I imagine that taking down the Man doesn’t pay much, and it’s probably not a purely volunteer activity,” he continued conversationally, and Skye looked over at him. “You need a certain amount of name recognition if you’re going to get people to donate to your cause.”

“Right!” she said, and Clint laughed.

“So the anonymous hacktivist collective has a fundraising arm?”

“Logistics, Clint,” Phil said. “It’s all logistics. It doesn’t matter if it’s SHIELD, the Rangers, the Ladies Auxiliary, or the Rising Tide. Any organization rises or falls on them-- and believe me, the Army has nothing on the D.A.R. in sheer organizational efficiency. Even loose cooperatives need to have ways to support members.”

“I’m just an ex-carnie sniper, I left that fancy stuff to the senior agents,” Clint replied. Phil pretended to believe him. How much of what Clint was saying was an act done for effect, versus what he truly believed, Phil didn’t know, but he didn’t have time to sort through it. They’d come up to the fence at last.

"Wow, nice digs," Skye said, as Phil led them through the gate into the darkened yard. "Very _Pioneer Woman_. Is that... is that a little trap door so you can grab the eggs?" She had made a beeline for the remaining hutch, and was shining her blue light over everything. Chickens looked up at her from the depths of their home and clucked indignantly.

"Hey, settle down, guys," Clint said, and slid the returning hen from his arms, shooing her off to go reunite with her fellow chickens-- and the dish of feed. "'Tasha's back."

"'Tasha'?" Phil asked, turning on him. "Did you just name the chicken, Clint? Haven't I asked you not to?" (He had, more than once in fact. Naming chickens just led to heartache later.)

Clint shrugged.

"Wait... did you just name the chicken after the Black Widow?" Skye added, and stared at him. "Holy crap, you must have balls of steel."

"No, just a death wish." Clint was grinning down at her, Phil could tell that even in the dark, and she was sparkling back up at him.

"That wouldn't shock me," she said, "given that you jumped from Avengers Tower and ran off, just to show up in, like, the first place all the bad guys would be looking for you. That's a great way to get yourself killed."

"It's also a great way to find out who the bad guys are," Clint told her.

"And what did you find out?" Phil interrupted. Clint looked over at him, eyes dark and possibly apologetic in the moonlight.

"That there were too many bad guys for me to handle alone," he said.

"Well, next time, don't handle it alone." Phil turned quickly to lock the hens into the hutch for the night. He gave himself time for just one quick sigh before he cleared his throat and turned back. "Speaking of which, let's take this discussion inside, please. I have a feeling we're all going to need a drink by the end of it."

"You got it boss," Skye said with a firm nod. "Just lead the way."

"Can I please get something harder than shandy this time?" Clint asked, and gestured her in front of him. Phil hung back a moment staring at them both, with a sinking feeling like a lead weight dropping somewhere inside. _Boss?_ , he thought, and wondered just how it was possible things could twist so far out of their expected patterns so quickly.

Clint turned to glance at him from the back porch, one leg hitched higher than the other on the steps, and smiled through his growing beard. It was a lost, ironic little smile, like he knew just what Phil had been thinking. _There's my answer, then. I let a superhero into my home, and now he’s doing what superheroes do: winning hearts and minds and taking up lost causes. And I’m not sure I could stop him… even if I wanted to._

____

Scotch was apparently allowable this time. Clint smiled gratefully at Phil when the lowball was pressed into his hands, and tried not to seem too lost. Skye was settling into the couch, curled up in one corner with her arms wrapped around her, holding the last of the shandy—of all things. Phil’d claimed his usual armchair, and Lucky had claimed the window seat, where he was snoring and whuffling happily.

Left with few other options, Clint perched himself on the low hearth and looked up at the other two. Skye’d made herself at home remarkably quickly, once she decided that neither he nor Phil were a threat. And she’d glommed onto Phil like… like… like Frank Barney had. Well. He should have been glad it wasn’t just him, probably, that Phil exuded that “I’ll take care of it” field to everyone. No need to get territorial about it.

“So it was the logistics that got us in trouble, I think," Skye said over her crossed arms. "That, and we’re so scattered it’s hard to know what anyone else is doing. I mean, it’s supposed to be so we don’t get caught, but… someone’s got to know what’s going on across cells, and I’m one of the ones that does.

“Ian Quinn is a big funder. I didn’t think anything of it for the longest time—he’s not the only rich white guy funding us for their own reasons. But lately I started to notice things. Like, rival companies of his, members were going after them, using the Tide’s name, for no good reason. Or, like, a couple times I noticed one of our people taking the port’s servers down in Hong Kong, and why the hell would we care? So I started to look. And I realized some of our people had to have been working for Quinn on the side, and he was using the Tide to hide ships coming into port, shit like that. It seemed like a long way to go just for corporate sabotage.”

“Not necessarily,” Phil interjected. Just how often _did_ he have to fend off corporate saboteurs, anyway, that he was so familiar with them? _And on that tip… why the hell does North Bar have a research bunker that's a black box to any kinds of electronic surveillance? Tony's never even down here._ Clint shrugged the thoughts off. One mystery at a time.

“Fine, whatever, it looked weird _to me_ ,” Skye muttered. “And the more I looked the weirder it looked. So he had these hidden shipments coming in at times when the Tide had conveniently shut down port surveillance. I did some counter-hacking, found out most of those shipments came from this place called Cybertek, and lately they’d all been headed for the Jersey shore. So I showed up in Atlantic City to check the shipments out. Took me a while to realize they didn’t _stop_ there, didn’t get unpacked and distributed. When I figured it out, I set up my plan; hacked into Cybertek and put through orders to customize a little Trojan phone for me in the next shipment. It showed up dockside in Atlantic City just like it was supposed to… but then it disappeared again. And showed up here. And Quinn’s yacht was off Atlantic City at the right time to pick up the crates, which really begs the question—“

“What the hell was Quinn so concerned about that he’d smuggle it on his own ship,” Clint finished for her. Skye nodded at him, and took a belt off her bottle.

“And that’s what I was hoping to get from looking at the cases tonight,” she said, "but you guys came in before I could.” She wound down then, and sat looking from Clint to Phil, and back, and playing with the soles of her sandals.

Clint let the silence hang.

He was struggling to find a way to tell her _thanks for the information, can we give you a ride back to the island, we'll handle it from here, please back off before you get killed_ that she might actually listen to. A member of an anonymous, anarchist, hacker society didn't seem to be the kind of person to handle appeals to authority really well, nor appeals to her own safety. And he wished, weirdly, that she'd found out more before they'd found her. That she could have laid it all on their plates, neatly trussed and roasted and tied up in a bow, just ready to carve into, no messy prep work required-- Clint was clearly thinking too much about that poor damn dead chicken still.

Phil shifted in his armchair, setting his glass down and leaning forward. Relief flooded through Clint. _Yes, he'll know what to say. He'll get Skye to back off and keep our secret. He'll find a way to get her away from me safely._

"I think you're underemployed, Skye," was what he actually said. "How'd you like a temporary job helping Frank here, and myself get the island cleaned up? You and he can start with sorting out the research bunker-- and everything in it. It's a good excuse for you to be out here frequently."

Skye sat straight up, her entire body quivering like Lucky when he'd spotted an unexpected plover.

"And what else would I help you with?” she asked, looking from one to the other. Clint opened his mouth to say _nothing because this isn’t happening_ but Phil overrode him.

“Bringing down a conspiracy of so-far unknown dimensions and clearing the name of a superhero,” he said, and Clint choked.

____

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on Washed Ashore: Clint and Phil make a deal, two Hawkeyes brood in a single wood, Nat visits our suspect, and Skye shocks everyone.
> 
> Thank you all for the comments and kudos-- when the writing just sucks, they’re what keep me excited to post each week. Speaking of, Chapter 7 comes on Saturday, and has to last you an extra day as I’ll be off on vacation in the Land the Internet Forgot. Which means I’ll probably have a cliffie at the end of it. You’ve been warned.


	7. Coming Aboard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint and Phil make a deal, but when Clint and Kate meet in the woods, he's sorely tempted to break it. Meanwhile, Nat is paying a visit, and Skye isn't playing around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A special Saturday chapter, due to my incipient vacation in the Internetless Wilds! 
> 
> Speaking of which, due to the vacation schedule, I **will not be posting a chapter on Sunday the 10th**. I don't have the luxury of having my beta stuck in a cabin with me this year, and the logistics involved in getting internet access to exchange edits are just ridiculous. We will be back on schedule the following week. Meanwhile, I will try not to leave you on a game-changing cliffhanger this time.
> 
> Obligatory chicken note: this chapter contains no actual chickens, merely allusions to them.

**One**

“What the _hell_ , Phil?”

Clint had been fairly proud of himself for waiting until Phil had escorted Skye back to her rented ( _hopefully_ rented) motorboat that night, had seen her off the island, and had made it back to the cottage, before the yelling started. Granted, this was partially because he’d spent the rest of the conversation after Phil’d made his offer speechless. He’d sat frozen on the hearth like a piece of the fucking furniture while Skye had accepted Phil’s invitation into their little conspiracy and the two of them had started setting terms. Plenty of words bubbled up in his head, but they all popped before they could make it out of his mouth. 

He hadn’t even protested Phil’s offer to see Skye off alone, because he needed time and quiet, to begin to hook actual words out of the churn of his brain. By the time the door creaked open to admit Phil into the little cramped entryway of the cottage, Clint had half worn out the rug with pacing. His mind was calmer, though.

Phil either didn’t notice him waiting in the shadows of the den or he was just so _done_ with the evening himself that he didn’t even acknowledge Clint when he got in, shoulders and head drooping and expression full of shadow. He was clearly preparing to go upstairs to his bed-- possibly because he was stupid enough to think Clint wouldn't have waited up, or possibly because he was just not thinking at all. Clint's growl stopped him, one hand on the newel post, and Clint caught him by the arm to keep him there. Phil turned, looking down at that hand before raising a face wiped blank to his. Frustration boiled up in Clint, and he forgot to let go of Phil as he cried:

"You brought her in on it? What were you thinking?" 

“Did you have a better idea?” Phil asked him. 

Clint went back, for a brief second, to bubble-popping in his brain, and he dropped Phil’s arm so that he could bury his face in his hands. Because no, he did _not_ have a better idea. That was why he’d been waiting for Phil to say something in the first, so that _he_ could find the words to tell Skye no. Not so that he could do _this_

“She’s a kid, she’s a civilian--” he protested, voice muffled in his palms. _Too damn many of those hurt already_. Between SHIELD, the Battle of New York, Hurricane Sandy, the fall of the Triskelion-- how the hell many more innocent people did he have to see in harm's way? 

_How many more lives can I stand to risk?_

There was a touch on the back of his hands, just a brush, like dune grass in a wind. It brought Clint back to the present, to the open night air in the shadowed hallway. He peeked out from behind his fingers to find Phil right there, face all concerned in the low light, his hand hovering as if he wasn’t sure whether to pull Clint’s down or not. (And if he did, what then?)

“She’s a hacker, not exactly an innocent bystander. Unless she's lying," he said at last, and paused, catching Clint's eyes, until he evidently found whatever he was looking for. "She could be working for an enemy, but in that case it's best to keep her close and see what she leads us to. Not that I'm really worried; her story's too outlandish to make it likely she's a spy. And I suppose she could be exaggerating her hacking prowess, but in that case I question how she tracked the crates and how she got into that bunker in the first place. It also sounds like she's probably committed enough felonies already to get her locked up in a federal penitentiary for a long time. Hell, just breaking into that bunker would do it. Skye seems to have done a good job getting herself into trouble without us,” he said. 

As if that somehow made it _better._ And he was still hovering close to Clint with that look on his face, halfway concerned, halfway befuddled, the nuances lost in his whiskers and the shadows that hung low in the dim hallyway light. It was making it difficult to concentrate on the argument at hand.

“Great, and we’re going to put her in a position to get caught! It was bad enough when it was _you,_ ” Clint said, waving a helpless hand at him. Phil drew back, eyes wide, “but how could I live-- how could _we_ live with ourselves if we got her hurt?”

“Clint,” Phil said, “I thought you were on board with this, I’m sorry. Well… not that sorry. She has skills we _need_ , because I sure as hell can’t hack into anything, and I didn’t hear you volunteering to.” Clint felt his face pucker up, in what he was sure was a _really_ attractive pout. Damn, Phil had good aim. “And she’s not any younger than I was when I joined the Army. How young were _you_ when you first made a similarly risky decision?” 

Phil was still being gentle, was the hell of it. His voice was sure, reasonable, engaging, whereas Clint knew _he_ was getting damn close to shrill. He realized he’d started to pace when he found himself half-tangled in the hat rack, and he spun at bay.

“That’s my goddamn point! She’s making me remember the decisions I made at her age, and I don’t _like_ remembering them, because I made a hell of a lot of stupid-ass decisions and I nearly died several times-- and other people did die. That I’m not in jail or a grave remains one of the great mysteries to me to this day. I trusted a lot of people I _really_ shouldn’t have.” God, his stomach was just going to drop through the floor, any moment now. Maybe he’d somehow gotten another jellyfish on his insides.

“Which is why she’s lucky we found her first.” Phil hadn’t moved except to cross his arms, which was frankly playing dirty, because it emphasized his shoulders in very distracting ways. _Now is not the time to head south on me, brain._ “Because at least she can trust _us_. Can’t she?”

“Fuck.” Clint heard his own voice come out, ragged and breathless, and squeezed his eyes shut against the sympathy he saw in Phil’s face. 

It was inevitable, he guessed, once he got Phil involved-- and his dog, and his chickens-- once he let Phil drag him back into civilization, that it was going to get out of control. Things just worked that way around him. Or rather, they fell apart that way around him.

There was at least an inch of paperwork in his old SHIELD file that waxed eloquent on that theme. Each SO or CO had their own variation, from Garrett’s somewhat resentful enthusiasm to Blake’s carefully-punctuated frustration down the long years of their association. Even Fury had several staccato interludes in his reports, though he and Clint had usually gotten on well. Clint had strongly suspected Fury of liking him partially _because_ Clint pissed off so many of the senior agents. Fury had a strange sense of humor. And here Phil was, not only rolling with the punches, but having just landed a doozy of a right-hook to Clint’s metaphorical jaw. He needed the world to stop reeling for a moment. 

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?” Phil rested an arm on the newell and leaned his chin on his hand, curiosity radiating from every line of his body, and that stupid amused twinkle came back into his eyes. Clint hadn’t realized until just now how he’d been missing that, since it had disappeared after they’d sat on the porch together as Phil plucked a chicken and a Hawkeye. The wave of gratitude that hit him at the realization he hadn't lost that when he'd stopped being Frank, nearly derailed his train of thought.

“How do you just…” _go from being mostly a hermit to inducting baby hackers into impossible conspiracies without batting an eyelash, figure out what we most need to hear, make me feel… not alone_ “draw people to you like that?” 

“ _Me_?” Phil straightened up, sounding incredulous. "I had nothing to do with it!"

This was such a patent untruth Clint didn't bother to reply to it with more than a skeptical glare, once he'd at least partially borrowed from Lucky. He was beginning to see how the dog had developed such an accomplished side-eye.

"Bullshit," he said, and folded his arms and dug in.

\----

The glower Clint was giving Phil reminded him so very much of the one that Tasha-the-chicken (no no no, no _names_ ) had been using during the good cop-bad cop-chicken cop portion of the evening that Phil was hard pressed not to laugh.

Clint's _words_ , though, just weren't funny. Ought to have been, might have been under other circumstances, but just at the moment the accusation sent slush through Phil's veins.

“It wasn't me, I don't see how it could have been me. I'm just the one who asked. You’re the one who recruited her, she was hanging on your every word. I figured it was a superhero thing-- unless it was the chicken. The chicken was kind of a stroke of genius.”

The return of the prodigal chicken had been the one pleasant surprise of the evening, and his earliest sign that Skye was worth a risk. Anyone who'd rescue a chicken they'd found wandering in the scrub, while attempting a covert infiltration, couldn't be entirely without redeeming qualities. Perhaps that was why Clint had used their shared chicken-affinity in the interrogation.

“Oh come on, who’d she call ‘boss,’ huh?” Clint seemed to realize that he was close enough to Phil still to poke him in the sternum, and did just that. 

Phil _hoped_ his shocked eep hadn't just fatally undermined his authority. Judging by the way Clint fell silent for just a moment before he grinned and kept talking, Phil was screwed. “I was just the comic relief," Clint said, beginning to glide forwards, "you’re the one she imprinted on.” 

“I barely said anything!” Phil cried, throwing up his hands and backing up, giving up on the conversation, Clint, and life in general for the night. If only he could get up the stairs... It was too late for this conversation, too late for the suggestion that _he_ might have influenced Skye's decision in any way, when _Hawkeye_ was right there next to him. 

“That’s my point! That’s entirely my point! You’re a dangerous man, Phil Coulson.” He sounded desperate, nearly, and Phil could do nothing but stare for a moment, not sure what exactly he'd heard in that gruff voice. His body knew what it wanted to have heard, of course, and was trying to make its opinions known, especially as Clint glanced away and half scowled. “You really need to keep that under better control,” he finished, and what did someone say to that?

What did you tell _Hawkeye_ \-- no, more importantly, what did you tell _Clint Barton_ with his sad smile and open face and the way he nonchalantly waltzed into lives and befriended dogs and chickens and hackers, what the hell did you tell him when he called _you_ dangerous? 

Phil would have liked to snap _you're blind_ , but thought it would break under the weight of its own irony.

“Fine,” Phil said after he finally managed to pull his brain back together sufficiently to form words. There was nothing to be done, it seemed, but shake his head to try and get some sense back into it, and accept that Clint was at least mildly delusional. Clearly, Phil hadn't been wrong-- his help was going to be needed. “Fine. I won’t recruit anymore teenage prodigies if you don’t.”

“Deal,” Clint said. 

And they shook on it.

**Two**

The beach had been deserted in the early morning, her footprints very nearly the only human ones marring the sugary drifts of sand as she wandered down the shore. The humps of the dunes at least partially shielded her from the early morning sounds of a town blinking itself awake and beginning its grumbling commute from home to work.

In the summers, even this early in the morning there would have been no solitude and the noises from town would have been thick with the shouts of children, yelps of their parents and groans of the hungover. Every street, every empty lot would have been full, every diner occupied, the clink of silverware and the hiss of emptying coffee pots busy in every door she passed, up on the streets. 

The big open granite kitchen of the Trashcan-- and yeah, Dad, that’s what the locals call our house, and they’re not wrong-- would have been clean and neat as a pin, the refrigerator stocked to the gills. She’d have had cold cereal anyway, just to be perverse, and as much coffee as she could manage before Dad or Heather were up. Not that there weren’t plenty of other times to stare blankly out of the rounded windows in the overgrown white stucco tower that was the central, dominating feature of their 1980s monstrosity of a beach house-- the one that always made her feel like she should have a dramatic perm or maybe a turban and sweep into and out of all the various open-plan living spaces or down the frosted glass of the stairway. 

Now, cold cereal was her only choice, and anyway she didn’t feel hungry, she felt _empty_. Like the stupid house, which seriously had windows-- and cousin Emily-- everywhere she turned. But Emily, like Kate’s stepmother, couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed early in the morning, and for some reason thought that no one else might have enough energy to get _up_ to anything, either.

So Kate had her mornings free, but with little to do,in a town that she was coming to believe she hadn’t known at all, those summers. _I feel like I’m wearing white shoes past Labor Day._ Early morning walks were one way to avoid America, though, and for the past week, Kate would readily admit, she had been doing just that.

 _Because you’re here_ wasn’t something she was ready to deal with, just yet. 

She’d seen a shadow the night before, standing near the base of their long dock, looking up into her window from far below, and she was sure she caught a hint of luminescence that had nothing to do with the moonlight. 

Then Emily had turned on a light below, flooding the deck, and the shadow had disappeared.

Kate’s dreams had been filled with that shadow; with the memory of stars shining white against brown wrists; the eyes of a hundred people in fancy dress, turned upwards to stare into the darkness, while her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest; of America’s grip firm on her arm; America’s breath in her ear whispering “we have to go now, Princess.” 

The dream clung to her footsteps down the glass stairs, out onto the deck, and then onto the beach. In the shadow of the dock, there was a long package wrapped in a black trashbag. Kate stared at it a long moment, before digging her nails in, stretching the oily plastic until it gave way and tore. Nestled inside, oh, _oh_ , was her bow. Her sweet, smooth, springy recurve, laid crossways on top of her quiver.

Kate laid her lips to the cool wood, before shucking the rest of the trashbag off and gathering her gear into her arms again. 

She still wanted to mostly punch America, though. 

_She shouldn’t know how to tempt me this well, not when I hardly know her._

(That was a little lie, maybe-- they’d met often enough in the abandoned warehouse Kate had provided for their little group. Even if Billy and Teddy and Eli were all there, too, and even if America seemed to stand in the corners and glower at Billy far more often than she _helped_ with anything. But Kate knew her, the strength in her fists and her eyes. And Kate knew the invitation was there, for Kate only, to come closer if she wanted.)

_And I don’t want to._

_I don’t_.

She wanted to feel the bow in her hands, though, the swing of the quiver at her hip, and so she skirted the base of the Trashcan and into the bushes surrounding the paved driveway. She pushed through those, and set off down the block until she hit the sandy public beach on the other side. There, she disappeared below the dunes and started walking, letting the sand scrub away the last of her dreams.

Eventually she hit a stone jetty, foamy at the top as waves crashed, and turned to walk against its side. It didn’t register quite how far she'd come until she looked up and saw the red and white bands of the lighthouse up the slope to her left, gleaming bravely in the now-streaming daylight.

“Guess I had a lot to walk off,” she muttered to herself, and looked around more carefully. To the extent that there was privacy or wooded land on the northern tip of Long Beach Island, it was gathered in the trees and scrub of the little state park that surrounded Gansett Light. If there was any place she could shoot without anyone seeing her, it was here.

Kate disappeared into the forest without a second thought.

**Three**

Clint was fairly sure he was having aural hallucinations, when he heard the first _thwunk_. 

He added actual, visual hallucinations when the _thwunk_ was followed a moment later by a _swoosh thwunk_ and an arrow streaking across the path in front of him, at approximately head height. 

_Been too damn long since I held a bow in my hands is all._ Still… he turned off the sandy path and began to push his way through the cedar and sassafras, following the trajectory of the most-likely-imaginary arrow. 

He wasn’t yet fully comfortable in public, in full daylight no less, though the denser the scruff of dirty blonde whiskers on his chin got, the better he felt. Still, he could go and see where the arrows had ended up without necessarily meeting the _archer_. The risk was minimal, and it’d help him kill the time till he was due to meet Skye and Phil for breakfast, so she could share her latest findings.

It had been a week since she’d insinuated her way into the quiet life of North Bar. Clint’s head had felt oddly hollowed out with anxiety the next day when she’d clambered up the dock outside the cottage, squinting in the sunlight, hands hunched in her pockets, in order to go and “help put the island back in order.” (And had been shocked when Phil handed her a toolbelt and pointed their steps to the mansion to begin work on the roof.) But Skye had a way of not intruding, of providing a counterpoint to the daily rhythms of the island that kept him and Phil from becoming awkward as they tried to sort themselves into new patterns. She made Phil laugh, mostly in spite of himself, and Clint caught himself more than once biting his lip to stem the fizziness that Phil’s laughter brought to his blood. 

The crates, when opened, had proved so baffling as to be utterly boring. One small case was full of four dozen cellophane-wrapped jewelry boxes, each holding a single Captain America’s shield lapel pin nestled onto a foam base. The one Skye had managed to insert a small smartphone into was half full of those, set to factory specs, and otherwise full of remote hard drives. In the safety of the bunker, Skye had plugged each of them in, but all were empty. The rest of the equipment was most arcane: fist-sized hydraulic joints with no obvious purpose, reels of wire fine as spider silk, and an entire case of shattered plastic test tubes. 

Skye’d sat amidst the scattered packaging bestowing her frown upon everything she saw, while Clint picked up each test tube, rolling it around in his hands. 

Phil’d sent them both to feed the chickens and walk Lucky while he made dinner. Watching Lucky run ahead of them down the beach, thinking of Phil puttering around in his kitchen, Clint started to feel his bones settle back into his skin finally. It was funny to be so relieved not to have lost this, when he'd barely had it.

After dinner, he and Phil sat on the porch swing, not really quite touching, and Skye perched on the balcony rail as they watched the sun hit the tops of the dune on its way across the island and into darkness. Looking out over the sun-reddened grass, Skye’d brought up the possibility of hacking into SHIELD.

Clint had put it back down.

Phil had brought it back up, and eventually, after a fair amount of grumbling through his beard, agreed with Skye.

It had never really been a contest, Clint saw that now. Phil’d cajoled and smoothed him into agreeing as easily as if Clint had feathers, laid eggs, and lived out in the coop. It ought to terrified him far more than it did, how easily Phil’s gentle rationalizations and wry smile and bad puns had him falling into line. But-- and this was the most obvious sign that Clint was in a weakened state-- it felt as natural to follow Phil as it did to take his coffee onto the porch in the mornings and drink in the smell of the sea. Nothing that Phil took an interest in would be risked lightly, therefore Skye would not be. Clint could trust that at least if things went bad, they’d do so for a _purpose_.

So there they were, waiting for Skye’s report. Phil was in town to pick up some supplies (and gossip-- always with the gossip). Clint had begged off the errand politely, since showing his face to dozens of hypothetical security cameras wasn't his idea of a relaxing morning. That had left him plenty of time to brood, though, before he hit up the Outrageous Egg to collect their breakfast orders. He’d shuffled his way up Central until he’d hit the end of it-- and just kept walking, straight onto a sandy path that cut through the brush. Eventually, the brush turned into woods, and he straightened up fully and took the first deep breath he’d had since they’d set foot in town that morning.

Clint liked to think that New York tower living hadn’t ruined him for _this_ , for the quiet moments in sunlit woods, listening to the occasional chatter of birds. Even though the year was tilting well away from Labor Day, the breeze was summery-- a late warmth in a fall that had been preceded by a strangely disordered summer, not that it was ever that evident on the streets of Manhattan. The change from Agent of SHIELD to superhero had reduced his opportunities to get _out_ like this, all on his own, and to walk strange terrain until he’d made it familiar under his feet.

Of course, he usually had a _bow_ with him, that was half the fun. Shooting in the woods was even better than a range and a set of targets; what fun was it when you didn’t have to _work_ to line up your shots? His hands felt unfinished, his shoulders restless, without one.

He’d just come to a little clearing, where black cherry trees spread their shaggy-barked branches over the undergrowth, when the third arrow _thwipped_ by him and hit the large lumpen bole that disfigured one of the trunks. Two other purple-fletched arrows already protruded from it, in a tight cluster. 

_Well hello,_ Clint stopped himself from going over and pulling them out. _Aren’t you beauties? If I wait, maybe your archer will come retrieve you, yeah?_

He waited through three more single arrows and then a cluster of three that arrived as one, burying themselves at even intervals over the diameter of the black knot bolus. Clint felt his eyebrows rise at those, and pulled himself back a little further into the leaves. 

The archer arrived soon after that, coming along a narrow, probably un-park-sanctioned path through the trees. She was tall, slender, and dark, and her bow was long, with golden limbs and a ruddy riser. His palms itched, and he ran them over his jeans to keep from reaching out, the desire to wrap his fingers around that smooth wood was so strong. The empty quiver slapped at her thigh as she walked, and her angular face softened into a smile as she reviewed the three arrows she’d evidently loosed all at once. 

He recognized her, of course, even in full daylight and with her face not twisted up lemon-sucking sour. And with a soft little mental _thwunk_ , the truth hit him. _Good to meet you, Girl Hawkeye._ It felt so _right_ that he didn’t even question it as he stepped out from behind a cedar and said:

“You know Domitian could fire _four_ arrows at once between his fingers.” 

Kate Bishop might be an incredible archer, but her reflexes still needed a little work. She jumped a mile high. When she came down, all her ease was gone and she prickled with suspicion. 

“Showoff,” she said, pulling the last of her arrows free of the bole, and Clint wasn’t sure whether she meant him or the Roman Emperor. 

“Frank,” he said, and held out his hand.

“I _know_ that.” She kept her distance, rolling the last arrow through her fingers. 

“That’s right, we met the other night. You were ragging on my cousin. Can’t believe I forgot a thing like that.” Clint balanced the tone of his voice on a tightrope between sunny and sarcastic. 

“Yeah, well, your cousin shouldn’t have been saying things like that about Hawkeye.”

Clint looked from her to her bow, then back up. 

“Should I ask whether the love for Hawkeye is because of the bow, or vice versa?”

“How about just because he was a superhero and he _saved New York_ more than once?” She shoved the arrow into the quiver and slung her bow now, so that she could cross her arms and glower at him. Clint held his hands palm up in mock surrender.

“Not intending to argue that one with you. Just wanted to admire the bow-- I’ve fallen in love with many a less worthy one than yours.” The glower softened into a suspicious frown.

“You shoot?”

“Some,” Clint allowed. “Mostly use a recurve. Compound only if I’m feeling masochistic. You been practicing long? Because that was fine work.”

“Long enough,” Kate said, and he watched her relax more as the subject turned to her weapon. _If I can’t figure out the way past your defenses, girly-girl, I don’t imagine anyone could_ he thought, _and if someone doesn’t, you’re gonna blow up and take us all with you_.

“I haven’t seen you on circuit? You should be competing, with that kind of work. You’d wipe the _floor_ with everyone.”

“Yeah well,” she said, but not as if she thought it was less than she deserved. _Good. Talent like that, she’d better damn well know how good she is._ “Dad doesn’t exactly like me doing it, so… I don’t compete.”

 _Your Dad’s certifiably insane._ Clint tried desperately not to say out loud. _And no wonder you were exiled to the beach house._ She was so restless in her own skin, now that she wasn’t focused on her weapon, that he thought she was going to shimmy free of it in a moment. He felt a sympathetic pang, and tried not to glance down at the bow.

 _God I want that in my hands_. 

“Not much space to practice in private out here, is there?” he asked instead, and she laughed.

“No, not so much. But… we’ve been separated for a little. Dad… wouldn’t let me bring her down with me. He almost never does. Anyway, the country club’s range isn’t worth it.”

“You’ve got her anyway. Smuggle her down?”

“No, a, uh, friend did that for me.” The shadows were dappling Kate’s cheeks, but Clint was still sure he was watching her blush, and converted his snort of amusement into a half-cough.

“Well, I wish your friend could do that for me,” he said-- blurted out, really. _Aw, mouth, no._ But that bow was _messing_ with his self-control. Still, it was less _his_ self-control he was worried about than hers. Which was why, even knowing what Phil was gonna say, he continued. “You know… you could come practice on North Bar. No one has to know.”

“I don’t think--” Kate began, but was interrupted by a call:

“Princess!” It was an alto voice, amused and frustrated at once.

She and Clint both startled, and Clint only had time to register a single _crunch_ to his right, before the curly-haired waitress from the Blue Peter was in the clearing, looking from him to Kate and back again. 

“What are you doing here?” she snapped at him, and Clint bit back a smile.

“Occupying my time until my cousin needs me,” he said. “You the one who brought her down her bow?”

“I--” America darted another glance at Kate. “What do you care?”

“I don’t. I just think it was a nice thing to do. And I’ll leave you two alone,” he winked at them impartially. “I’ve got a meeting to get to, with my cousin and an Outrageous Egg. They any good?” he asked Kate, and she shrugged.

“Not bad, anyway. A little kitschy. But that’s this place all over.” 

He let a smile be his answer, and turned to trace his way back to the path.

He could feel two sets of eyes boring into his back as he left.

**Four**

“Under any other circumstances, I would be delighted to have met you, Agent Romanov, and I wish I could have been more help,” Ian Quinn said, as he leaned over the rail, the breeze ruffling the open throat of his collar. 

Natasha looked up at him, the white of his teeth as bright as the sides of the oversized, orca-sleek stack of fiberglass, metal, and brightwork he called a yacht. They were an even match, him and his rich man’s toy of a boat, too charming and seductive by half. 

“Not at all,” she told him, and set a hand to her chest. “You were very helpful.” That would have happened entirely by accident on his part; he certainly hadn’t _meant_ to be helpful to Natasha when she’d showed up on his yacht an hour earlier, though he’d been perfectly polite. She’d come with a sway in her hips and a leading smile, and not even a flimsy excuse to cover her interest in the last place Clint Barton had been seen alive.

Quinn had been in, and he’d offered her vodka and a tour of the yacht, and had stayed by her side the entire time, frowning sadly with her over the gallery at the stern of the boat, along the top deck. 

“That’s where he went over?” she asked, letting her voice tremble a little, and he nodded.

“So I’m told. I was forward, in the lounge, with about half the event planning committee for the Met-- speaking of archery-related fiascos. But that’s not of interest to you. Go ahead, look around-- I’m sure if there’s anything to find you’ll find it.” Quinn’s gesture was expansive enough to nearly slop the olive out of his martini. Combined with the open shirt and that smile of his, which had a tendency to smear, the effect was impressively louche. Also, of course, entirely made up. 

As a tactic to appear innocuous, it was _too_ effective; it shot right past convincing and into highly dubious. As a way to stonewall her, however, it was much better, and he and Natasha spent the rest of the visit politely enough, sipping mixed drinks and pretending not to side-eye each other.

At last, he’d escorted her politely to the gangway, and bundled her out of the boat in a flurry of compliments and apologies.

Now, as he loomed over her from the rail, his mouth turning smug at the edges, she frowned and looked away, letting her lips fall into the pout she reserved for men like him-- and Loki. “Poor Clint.”

“If we’d known…” Quinn spread his hands, by all measures genuinely sorry, “If he’d _said_ something, just asked for a tour like you did, instead of sneaking aboard. Or if he’d identified himself, instead of fighting my staff…. But the seas were too high, and we couldn’t go back for him. We called the Coast Guard, we did everything we could.”

For once, Natasha was able to let her _real_ thoughts shine through in her expression, and it was a relief, and more of one to see Quinn backpedal quickly, hands releasing the rail as he retreated. 

“I’m sure you did, Mr. Quinn,” was all she said. And that was when the limousine-- the wholly unexpected limousine-- rolled up along the pier, scattering seagulls every direction as it went. One, Natasha was pleased to see, hit Quinn in the shoulder on its flight. 

As the limo came to a stop a tinted window rolled slowly down to reveal Tony Stark lounging in the back seat, grinning from beneath his tinted sunglasses. Natasha rolled her eyes at him, then turned back for one last glance at Quinn, and the yacht.

“Goodbye, Ms. Romanov, and I hope you found what you were looking for,” he called out to her, smarm back in place as if it had never left.

“I hope I did, too!” she replied, and got into the limo.

It was dark inside, cool and sterile as the air conditioning circulated slowly through the cabin. Tony glanced at her, then up and down, taking in her sundress, heels, careful updo.

“Nice nails, they really make the outfit,” he said at last. “And I can’t believe I’m actually saying this to _you_ , because really, this is your line and I’m the one who usually gets berated, but what the _hell_ was the point of that, Nat?” 

“Why are you here, Stark?” Once, she would have growled at him for calling her _Nat,_ but it had spread from Steve to Sam to Stark in a remarkably short period of time-- Tony, she thought, just because he liked to push boundaries and hated to be left out of things.

She hadn’t stopped it. It hadn’t seemed worth it, that was all. Certainly not because she missed hearing it-- because it didn’t seem right in other voices than Clint’s, so what was the point?

“I got a call-- or really Pep did-- a very polite-but-firm-call, from Quinn-- or really his people-- asking if we could come pick up the Avenger that had invited herself onto his yacht and was trying to interrogate him using her feminine wiles.”

“They said ‘feminine wiles?’” Natasha asked, one eyebrow raised, and shifted herself just slightly so that her knee slid free of her skirt hem. Tony sighed at her, and she bit back a smile.

“Nat, what the hell did you think you were going to learn that I couldn’t have told you? I’ve been in and out of that guy’s files ‘till I know his company better than I know my own-- and don’t even start with what Pepper would say about that. He’s not squeaky clean, but I can’t find _any_ thing on him and Barton, or on Project Centipede that SHIELD was worried about. If Barton was on that boat, he was either chasing a red herring, or he was trying to do something _to_ Quinn, not _find_ something.”

They were driving away from the pier now, the dockside receding in the rear windshield, and Tony was starting to relax. He’d always been uncomfortable being the responsible one, as if anything put into his hands would automatically break into little bits. Pulling the Avengers together after the fall of the Triskelion had been more an exercise in keeping them relatively safe during the Senate hearings that followed than anything else, or so he swore. The only one who had ever really believed that was Tony himself. 

It made sense that he drew the short straw, the “come pick up the Black Widow” straw. Agent Hand, their long-suffering SHIELD liaison, would hardly agree to do so, especially as she was barely talking to Tony these days, and Cap didn’t deal with billionaires well. Natasha wished briefly for Agent Blake back; over the months he'd spent babysitting Tony in Malibu, he'd at learned at least enough that he would have taken this off Tony's hands. Anyway, he had been used to collecting her (and Clint) from odd places. _Unless you can make it happen, why bother to wish?_

“And what will happen if I go back?” she asked him, and he grimaced.

“Well, SHIELD will happen, apparently, or lots of lawyers, or both or add in the Mayor… I never pay attention when someone’s bullying me, and I’d tell you to go for it in a heartbeat just to piss the guy off if it seemed like it was worth it at all. Nat,” Tony sat forward, and his hand hovered over hers for a half-second before he remembered that he did not have a death wish that particular morning. “Quinn isn’t our guy. And… it may be time to…” he huffed a breath, and looked away.

“Tony?” she asked, letting her head-tilt do the rest of the questioning for her. He wouldn’t look back at her; he was as bad as Steve, half the time.

 

“Look, I didn’t just look at Quinn, I promise. I made SHIELD give me all the information, I went to Fury and got actual legitimate all-access passes.”

“I know you did,” her voice was gentle.

“Yeah, well, I hacked ‘em anyway,” he said, “just in case. And the thing is, Nat… the thing is that some of this information could _only_ have been accessed by Barton. The credentials match his biometrics.”

But biometrics, Natasha did not have time to say, are subject to many sorts of hacking. And not just the sort that requires eyeballs. She didn’t have time to say it, because Tony was rushing on, already waving away her objection.

“I know, I know what you’re gonna say. But the logins correspond with him being at the SHIELD bases, or in places where he could have snuck away from us to go there. The number of living people who could have _done_ that, who would have known his itinerary and known enough about _him_ to get access to all of this? They come down to Agent Hand, and us. And she was off-duty, dealing with some leftover mess at the Hub, one of the times he was accessing the data. You’d need someone who knew his habits-- and at SHIELD, there aren’t enough of them left alive. I’m sorry, but… we have to start thinking about maybe he _was_ passing on information?”

“ _I_ don’t have to start thinking anything,” Natasha told him, and it had been years, it had been since she was _Natalie Rushman_ , playing secretary to a dying, depressive genius with a suit of armor out of science fiction, since she’d wanted quite so badly to shake him until his teeth rattled.

“Look, I didn’t say he turned on us! I mean, maybe he was being coerced! Or maybe he had some good reason for it-- but all the evidence, all the facts point that way! What do you expect me to do? I’m not Cap-- I can’t do that ‘I don’t care what the facts say’ thing he does sometimes. Which he’s really pissing me off with, right now, by the way.”

“God, Stark,” Natasha sighed, “just leave it for now, okay?”

They passed the rest of the drive in silence. It wasn’t until they’d both gotten out of the car, and Tony had lingered faux-casually, talking with the driver, long enough that she could get to an elevator by herself, that she pulled out her phone.

Not her usual phone, the latest in her ever-changing series of burners. (She coordinated them to her outfit, at this point.) This one was a little silver flip so small it disappeared into her hand. She started the text as soon as the elevator doors closed.

_Were you able to do as I asked?_

The reply came shortly after:

_Yes. Answers not what you want. Clean sweep._

But that was _exactly_ what Natasha had wanted to hear: Ian Quinn had known she was coming. And he’d cleaned up far too thoroughly for an innocent man. Tony had just told her he hadn’t been directly involved with Clint, but that helped too-- it meant she had to look at his other connections, to find the one that he’d had Clint killed to try to hide.

 _Tried to have Clint killed,_ she corrected herself, as that thought hit with the precision of one of her knives. _Tried_.

**Five**

Discussions of a high order were evidently well underway already when Clint got to the playground that lay opposite the Gansett Light First Aid Squad station house. The sun was high enough in the sky by now that the plastic twists of the slides and the brightly-colored bridges, tubes, and oversized tic-tac-toe boards all gleamed beneath a clear cloudless blue sky. 

Skye was idly pushing at the wedges mounted on poles, flipping them between X es and Os, as she talked with Phil. He had commandeered the closest of the rubber swings, sitting on it as if it were a saddle, his hands braced against his knees, and he rocked gently back and forth as she talked, powering the movement with just tiny shifts of his calves. A thermos snuggled in the sand beneath his feet.

Clint nearly dropped breakfast. 

_Shit._

Neither of the two of them noticed him and he paused for a moment, swallowing down the flush that had run so suddenly through his body at the sight of Phil and rearranging the paper sacks more firmly in his grip. They were already greasy, as if the line cooks buttered the sacks as well as their griddles. _It's okay, it's nothing, you've been reacting to him like this from day one, it's not different now._

If it _felt_ different, the change was not in Phil. Bless everything about Phil, after the initial awkwardness had worn off, it turned out he treated Clint as Frank far more often than as Hawkeye. No, any change must be from Clint himself, from the way he felt crumbly as a naked dune without Frank's name around him, sensitive to every last little puff of wind from Phil's direction.

Skye was getting more vehement now, the game pieces until they spun round and round, one hand leaving its task to gesture more. Phil watched her closely, occasionally templing his fingers against his lips, shaking his head. After a while, she must have decided he wasn’t listening, because she advanced on him and poked his shoulder, as if he were just another O. 

_You’re not taking this seriously, boss,_ her lips said.

He clearly snorted, but then gave a tiny helpless sort of smile when she looked away, and Clint’s heart turned over.

“Clint!” 

Skye’d spotted him, was waving, him over. Phil turned, too, eyes crinkled against the sunlight. Clint’s feet were already halfway across the damp lawn before he’d realized he was moving.

“Hey, order’s up,” he said, and Skye reached over to relieve him of the sacks, reading the grease pencil hieroglyphics with evident ease. 

“A Mexican omelette for me,” she said, setting one sack aside. “The Twos, for Mr. Traditional over here.” She handed Phil the cardboard clamshell container housing his two eggs over easy, hashbrowns, two pieces of toast, and two sausages, then balancing a fork in the pocket of his button-up. 

_It’s only been what, a couple few days, maybe a week, since she met us and already she’s sticking plasticware in his shirt?_ Clint thought to himself, then startled as she handed him back a sack, with another fork pinned awkwardly between sack and finger.

Clint caught the sack, caught the fork, and winked at her.

“And for you, eggs, country fried steak, and home fries, which-- really? You’re not kidding with that?” 

“How else do you think I’ll keep my guyish figure?” he asked her and retreated to the cross ties that formed the delineation between the lawn and the sand. It left him very nearly able to lean against the metal stands of the swing set and Phil’s knees. He sat pointedly, re-arranging himself for maximum comfort and trying to ignore the quirk of Skye's eyebrow.

“I’m more worried about the gravy and your ability to keep your shirt clean,” she told him.

“My shirt, technically,” Phil put in mildly. As Clint glanced back over his shoulder, startled, Phil handed him the cap of the thermos, already filled with coffee. Clint wasn’t sure whether or not it was a shame, that the angle was wrong to read the look on his face.

“So, what were you talking about?” he asked, and sipped coffee rather than let his mind stray to just what look _might_ have been there, lurking beneath the unusual burr in Phil's voice.

“Stuff and things. Mostly just waiting for you,” Skye said, “and here you are. So are we gonna debrief, or what?” She sat down on one of those play diggers that was mounted on a steel post, and opened her food.

“Lay it on us, O Goddess of the Internet,” Clint said, picking up the gravy-covered battered steak delicately between forefinger and thumb, and preparing to bite. “What have you discovered in your toils and travels across the Land of the Cybers?” 

Behind him, Phil let out something suspiciously like a choked laugh.

“Um,” Skye said, “well, as is traditional in these sorts of things, I’ve got good news and bad news. What do you want to hear first?”

“Bad news,” Phil said, “Summary and then specifics, please.” Clint appreciated that, since he didn’t have a chicken around to discombobulate Skye with this time if she started to ramble and he didn’t really want to throw things. So he just nodded and bit into his steak.

“Okay,” Skye said, looking skeptical. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“We won’t,” Phil told her, and she nodded, and took a deep breath.

“Okay, thing is? Whoever planted the evidence had a hell of a lot of inside access to SHIELD… and I could maybe find out who that is, by following the pattern of access points. But to get what we need? We're gonna need _physical_ access to SHIELD computers. We need to get inside SHIELD.”

Clint dropped his steak.

\----

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I lied about the cliffhanger.
> 
> Next Chapter: Skye backs up; the Avengers bicker; and Clint and Phil try to find any possible alternative.
> 
> Guys, I am going to MISS you this week, and all the comments that make me turn bright red and stammer, and the conversations about chicken naming conventions, and all the encouragement. Have I mentioned lately that you all make this story better? Because you do. (Go ahead and leave comments anyway-- if only just to see how badly I misspell things when trying to reply from a moving vehicle.) 
> 
> However! Over on [tumblr](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/tagged/Washed-Ashore) I'm going to have sneak peaks from the upcoming chapters, plus other goodies from the reference file, queued up to tide you over until Chapter 8.
> 
> I'll be back, Washed Ashore will be back, and we'll all batten down the hatches, because the wind is picking up.


	8. Dead Reckoning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everyone’s pasts are coming back to haunt them. Except Skye’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: the chicken is still not a shapeshifting superhero. Or a velociraptor. Probably.
> 
> And we’re back! Washed Ashore will post weekly until the end after this. I’m still planning about 20 chapters. I do add additional tags and warnings from time to time, so please review. And now… back to Washed Ashore.

**One**

“Back up,” Clint said, poking two fingers at Skye, heedless of the gravy on them and the grass accumulating on his steak where he'd dropped it next to the swingset. “Back the hell right the fuck up right now. That’s a no. Non. Nej. Nyet. Nein. Hapana. No one is infiltrating SHIELD.” Phil couldn’t see his face, but the back of his neck had gone chalk-white, so it was a good bet the rest of him was similarly bloodless with shock.

Phil was sympathetic, he really was, especially as his own initial reaction had been to forget to swallow his coffee. He'd managed to keep from spraying it across the top of Clint’s head, thank everything, but that had only led to a coughing fit that had nearly spilled him off the swing he was straddling. The idea was ludicrous on the face of it that the three of them sitting in the middle of a playground-- literally in a sandbox-- were supposed to infiltrate one of the most paranoid intelligence agencies in the world?

But in the very short time he’d known her, Phil had learned Skye was many things, foolhardy definitely among them, but prone to making mistakes in her analysis she was not. After all, she was here on merit; she'd tagged and traced a mysterious shipment halfway across the globe to be here in a playground, giving them this news.

“I take it back,” he said gently, “start from the beginning.”

Skye grimaced and poked at her omelette for a second with her fork, before setting it at her feet with a sigh so that she could steeple her hands in front of her lips, then bring her chin up to rest on her fingers. Straddling the yellow metal sand digger as she was, she reminded him of bored workers on lunch break in a road construction zone. 

“Okay, the thing is, the crates were a dead end, we know this.”

“A dead end right now,” Phil said, because what they really were was one of those blurry puzzle pieces that make up the interior of 5,000 piece sets, the ones that have absolutely no meaning until you’ve completed a good three-quarters of the puzzle. They fit in somewhere, he was sure of it. Skye accepted the correction with a shrug.

“Yeah, anyway, I _started_ looking for mentions of Quinn and crates and such in the SHIELD databases, like we talked about. And Project Centipede and the other key words you remembered,” she gestured at Clint. “And that took the better part of the week, because SHIELD’s pretty damn secure. Not secure _enough_ , mind you, but I figured this might not even be accessible from servers hooked up to the internet and maybe it didn’t used to be, except that get this-- Tony Stark requested a lot of the information a few weeks back, and when they gave it to him, the guy who sanitized it left it on a server that’s… well… I mean you’ve got to hop a bit, but you can get into it. So I was able to find the files, right?”

“Thank you, Tony,” Clint muttered.

“Don’t thank him yet, thank him after I tell you I think he also hacked into the servers himself, and that actually left me a trail to follow. And a way to cover my tracks,” Skye said, looking extremely self-satisfied. At Phil’s feet, Clint put his head in his hands-- streaking gravy through his increasingly-shaggy hair-- and sniggered. When he looked back up, the gravy was still there, a little grease streak just begging to be wiped away.

“Then thank you, Tony, for being Tony,” Clint said, as Phil reached out reflexively and smoothed the offending lock until it was clean. Clint tensed under his hand as he finished, and he withdrew it quickly, resisting the urge to sit on it. 

“I know, right?” Skye was saying, “And it was kinda fun, too, seeing where Stark had gone, and if I could figure out how to get further than he had.”

“Which you did?” Clint leaned back nearly into Phil’s knees, brushing against them, in fact, as he settled. For a half moment, all Phil's attention was focused on his kneecaps. Skye continued:

“Which I didn’t. But I figured out why he hadn’t been able to. See, he followed the trail up far enough to find out that someone logging in as you had been pulling data on all sorts of high-level stuff nearly since you all started your extended Super-sleepover at the Tower. One of the items of interest to them? Ian Quinn. Stark pulled times and dates and locations, and I’m just going to take a wild guess they all corresponded to places you’d been-- I can show you the list.”

“Please,” Phil interjected, feeling Clint start to shift nervously at his feet, little dissatisfied twitches of his shoulders and ass. _Calm down. Nothing to do yet but hear it all out._ Phil shuffled so that the toes of his boots barely brushed the edges of Clint’s butt, and Clint stilled a little at the contact.

“And that’s where Tony stopped?” Clint asked. 

“Yeah-- because I gotta tell you, from where he was sitting, I bet it looked like it was you. Except--” Skye held out her hand to forestall Clint, “that we all know better, right?”

“Right,” Phil said, and decided to experiment a bit on the Clint-calming front. He rocked forward to let his knees press briefly at Clint’s back as a punctuation to the vote of confidence. Clint turned around to shoot him a look of gratitude. Gravy streaked his lower lip just above his scruff, and Phil fought the urge to reach down and thumb _that_ off, too. _Concentrate, goddamnit; conspiracies now, fantasies later._ His brain, in a fit of flagrant rebellion, shot him a sharp urge to _lick_ , instead. _Shit._

Oblivious to the struggle going on between Phil’s libido and his higher reasoning powers, Skye continued:

“And that’s the good news!”

“It is?” Clint had abandoned his heart-attack platter in favor of leaning forward incredulously. Lonesome as his knees felt at the loss, Phil decided this was probably better for their continued survival. As a Clint-calming experiment it was going well, but as a Phil-calming experiment it was a colossal failure. _I know I used to have more self control than that._

“It is! Because we know _someone else_ pretended to be you, and whoever it was, was in _every place you were logging in from_ , which means there’s departure and entry data for  
 _them_ too on the SHIELD security logs.”

“Which are never kept on servers that hook up to the internet, I’m guessing,” Phil sighed. The dilemma was becoming uncomfortably clear.

“Yep, exactly.”

“So, we need to go every place I supposedly logged on from, to find out who was always there when I was?” Clint asked. Skye shook her head.

“No, thank god. At least half the log-ons were at the NY hub, as you’d expect. And according to the training docs I found, ever since the Triskelion fell-- which I really want to hear more about some day-- monthly security logs from the rest of SHIELD’s bases are couriered over on hard drives-- which maybe you can explain to me why, ex-SHIELD-guy.”

“Basically, for someone to do oversight to make sure HYDRA’s not quietly re-infiltrating SHIELD,” Clint shrugged. “The number of agents right now that are pretty much busy making sure SHIELD’s sea creature infestation doesn’t redevelop is probably half as large as the number of agents in the field-- and SHIELD already lost enough agents as is.”

“How the hell are they keeping the normal business of the agency functioning?” Phil asked, hearing his voice curl high at the end. It seemed completely unsustainable. Clint shrugged and gave him another of those painful little smile-twitches.

“By the skin of their teeth, and everyone working overtime,” he said. “But okay-- I get it, I think. Security’s computers, the ones it needs to compile and sort data like that, are hooked up to an internal ethernet that’s entirely self-contained. If we can get access to it and pull all the data, not just the stuff Tony was given, you think you can figure out who was setting me up.”

“Bingo!” 

“Thing is,” Clint said, hunching forward further, “there aren’t that many people who’d have access to know where I was at any moment, and be able to just _be_ there. And most of ‘em are Avengers.”

Skye’s grimace told Phil that she-- like he-- had come to that conclusion already. It was nearly impossible to imagine that _any_ of the heroes of New York would be on the take, or traitors-- much less setting up another of their number.

“Who else?” he asked.

“Victoria Hand, I guess,” Clint said, shaking his head. “She’s our liaison to SHIELD, goes with us into the field more than half the time. Don’t get me wrong, she and I never got _along_ , and she really, _really_ doesn’t get along with Steve and Tony, but I’d have a tough time seeing it being her. She used to head the Hub, you see. Biggest SHIELD base in the sector, everyone went through there. HYDRA had got at it bad, more than half the staff were plants. The Hub survived mostly thanks to her. She was _ruthless_ , but she wasn’t a traitor then and I don’t fucking think she’s one now.”

“But who else, Clint? There have to be others.”

“Fury,” Clint said, and shrugged. “And yeah-- no. Just _no_. But pretty much anyone else who knew me well enough to spoof my credentials, and who had high-level access to every SHIELD base I’ve been at recently? They’re mostly all dead.” 

Skye, who’d been watching him intently, suddenly took renewed interest in her omelette-- at least, enough to stare holes in the eggy mass. 

Phil felt a wave of nausea batter him, and set aside his own breakfast. He hadn’t been eating it anyway. He wiped his hand on his jeans, then laid the tips of his fingers along the tense top of Clint’s right shoulder, pressing for a half second. Clint shivered into the touch.

“All of them? That’s not-- okay, really?” Skye said, eventually.

“It’s been a bad few years for top level agents,” Clint replied, his voice thin and acrid as turpentine. “The ones who’d really know me, _and_ have access? Lost three of ‘em at the fall of the Triskelion-- one was HYDRA, and the others died in the fighting. Nat came with me out of SHIELD, and don’t even bother asking. Nat would do a lot of things if the stakes were high enough, and I’m sure betraying me is on the list, but _never_ like this. Anyway if it were her, I’d be in a cell already.”

“What about the others?” Phil asked, because four people out of the entirety of SHIELD seemed ludicrously small. Clint had been an agent for a decade according to his bio-- there was no way that he had so few intimates.

“Two of my old SOs died in the Battle for New York, when the Helicarrier was attacked. Blake and Garrett-- they’re on SHIELD’s fucking wall of heroes at the Triskelion. Or were, before it was destroyed in the fighting. I’d rather have Blake back than a plaque, let me tell you.” Clint spoke so softly Phil had to hunch forward to catch it, and when he did he was sorry. Had Clint faced them personally, when he’d been brainwashed by Loki?

“Of course,” Clint said, straightening up suddenly, so hollow Phil wanted to make sure he wouldn’t float away, “we found out later one of _them_ was HYDRA, too. It nearly killed Tony and Steve-- but Thor, even more. Garrett had died trying to keep Loki from ejecting Thor out the bottom of the Helicarrier, y’see.”

“He, um, what?” Skye asked in a tiny voice, mouth hanging open, and Phil was glad someone had, because he couldn’t find the words to start, nor the will to believe the question was relevant to anything except his own morbid curiosity.

“Agent John Garrett,” Clint said, the name rolling off his tongue, and he picked up his plastic knife and began jabbing the grass fitfully, concentrating all his attention on it. “One of my first SOs. They had Loki captive in a containment system for the Hulk, but he got out, and got Thor caught in it. Garrett ran off on his lonesome, grabbed some big experimental weapon, went to go be heroic at Loki, confront him without waiting for backup.”

“That was a stupid idea.” The words were out of his mouth before Phil could stop himself, and Clint’s shoulders heaved. _Touching him now might break him to pieces,_ Phil thought, and wiped his hand hard across his beard instead, trying to scour the desire from it.

“Yeah, it was,” he said, “but Garrett always liked being the big damn hero, and he thought he couldn't die. Anyway, all it got him was Loki dropping Thor out the bottom of the ‘Carrier, and pushing Garrett right after.”

“He didn’t make it?” Skye whispered. She’d curled over the top of the digger and wrapped her arms around her knees, like an inverted snail with all the soft bits on the outside.

“From as high in the air as we were?” Clint looked up at her briefly, and Skye winced at whatever she saw on his face. “ _Thor_ barely made it, and the guy can fly.” 

"And he was HYDRA?” she asked. Clint ducked his head back down, staring hard at his knees.

"For most of two decades, as it turned out." 

"That had to hurt."

For some reason, that was where Phil unfroze, because it was either move enough to release the ache in his lungs, or never breathe again. His shuffle sent the swing rocking back gently, then forward, until he nearly brushed Clint’s back again. Clint looked up at that, over at Skye, and set the knife down in the grass.

"Skye, a whole hell of a lot of SHIELD agents were HYDRA, and the further up the ranks you went the worse it got. No one got out the other side without feeling betrayed by friends, lovers, or coworkers. I sometimes think it would have been kinder to let the whole agency go. Just another mistake in my long line." He put a hand on Phil’s foot as he said it, knobby fingers curling over the toe of his boot, as if he already knew that Phil was going to bristle at that, was trying to gentle him down preemptively.

"But... he died trying to save SHIELD. Was that a lie?” Skye said truculently. “Did he... not know what he was doing?"

"Eh, now you sound like Tony. Look-- and since you're in this now you better understand-- never mistake personal courage for something only the good guys have.” He released Phil’s boot in favor of wagging a finger at Skye. This was Clint, sure of himself, his entire body focusing in on her just slightly. _And this is Hawkeye, after all, and all his arrows are sharp, and he always hits his target._

“John Garrett had it,” Clint continued, “and he knew how to be dramatic, too. What he did was no more or less courageous than what Blake did-- that cold-blooded bastard had been lurking by Loki’s cell waiting for the guy to make a move; all it got him in the end was skewered in the back. Blake was as true-blue SHIELD as they come, but both of them are equally dead. Anyway it's not like HYDRA wanted Loki to win anymore than we did. You can't HYDRA-fy a world ruled by space invader overlords. Anyway... that's Garrett off the list. He went splat." Clint flattened his hands as if wiping the idea off the table. "No… we’ve got dead people, Avengers, the Director of SHIELD, and the SHIELD liaison to the Avengers. Could be a combination, I guess.”

Skye perked up at that, and so did Phil, though he suspected for somewhat different reasons.

“Oh, yes, good idea!” she said, and then drooped and averted her eyes. Phil realized Clint must be giving her a truly epic look.

“Yay! Because _one_ evil conspiracy growing inside SHIELD wasn’t enough, now my _remaining_ friends want me discredited and dead. Wooooooo.”

It was like Clint was iron, and Phil’s fingers and knees suddenly magnetized. They were pressed against Clint’s back, holding him together by main force, before Phil could call them back. 

“Right, yeah, sorry,” Skye backpedaled quickly, hands up in front of her to ward Clint off. “Not good idea. Bad idea. Worst idea. Forget that idea. Um… on the bright side, maybe whoever it is, they’re HYDRA, too? Maybe you guys just didn’t clear out everyone?”

“Some bright side.”

“I know, I know, but we’ll find out more when I can get inside SHIELD,” Skye said. 

“No,” Clint snapped, as he and Phil shot up straight at the exact same time. 

“Absolutely not,” Phil said. “Skye, you’ve got nowhere near the training to do infiltration. You can show us how to do anything you need.”

“Well, I--”

“Not 'us', me" Clint said, spinning around and staring at Phil. “I’ll go in. After dark should work, right Skye? It wouldn’t be the first time I infiltrated my own base.”

Phil didn’t even know where to start with that, which of the many very, _very_ salient reasons why sending the wanted man straight back into the heart of enemy territory was an idea about on par with sending a pig into an open-pit cookoff already slathered in barbecue sauce to open with. He didn’t use any of them.

Instead, he growled “Over my dead body.”

\----

If it had been anyone else, anyone at all, Tony or Steve or Nat or Fury or any number of now-dead SOs, Clint would have pretended to back down once the argument was lost, but really been quietly planning his foray into SHIELD's ventilation system right at that moment. His reasoning was sound, his cause just: _my problem, my risk to take, I'm the one who knows SHIELD best, I've infiltrated that damn base more times than I can count on one hand, for much less cause than this._ (There was the bet with Sitwell, for instance, and that time he'd kinda sorta gotten on the wrong train on the subway and ended up dressed in only a pair of pink yoga pants with "DIVA" written on the ass in sparkles, and you don't go into SHIELD through the front door looking like that.)

Phil, though, that aggravating bastard, just waited until Clint finished fuming and explaining all his logical and sound reasons. Then he sighed and with fingers at his temples turned Clint's head back in Skye's direction. Her eyes were wide and she was biting her lip, and altogether looking like a kid who'd climbed up on the high dive platform and was out on the edge weebling and wondering if she could manage to back off without falling.

"Skye," Phil said gently, "if Clint gets caught at SHIELD, what'll happen to him?"

 _She doesn't know,_ Clint wanted to say, _it doesn't matter, because I know what would happen if she got caught and that's why this'll be me and not her_.

Skye looked up, licked her lips, and said:

"He'll get mad at us when we break in and rescue him before he gets disappeared to FEMA's re-education camps?"

"Okay no," Clint yelped, "First of all... _first_ of all just no, FEMA does not have re-education camps, and secondly, you would not be breaking in to rescue me."

"Look, it was a figure of speech, since I don't _know_ where SHIELD sends people it wants to disappear, which is exactly why we'll be rescuing you before you get disappeared there."

"It's the Fridge, they send them to the Fridge, it's like the Cooler only harder to get out of and you're probably too young to understand that reference and anyway oh my god, no, you'll get killed. Phil would stop you. Phil. You'd stop her." He turned around so fast he flailed, and grabbed Phil's knees for balance. 

"Hard to stop her when I'd be right alongside her, Clint," he said, placing his hands over Clint's. "That's a promise."

_Godfuckingdamnit._

Unfortunately, Clint knew perfectly well what a Coulson promise was worth. Which meant he wasn't going to be going off and quietly sneaking into SHIELD all by himself, no matter how much his brain was screaming at him that it was the only rational solution.

"You don't even... you wouldn't get past the _entrance_ ," Clint hissed, and pointed at them, "either of you." Although... although... he honestly wasn't sure about that. In fact, it was the possibility that with the combination of Skye's hacking skills and whatever was in Phil's Rangers background that he kept two-stepping away from in conversations, they'd get just far enough to be unable to talk themselves back out, that was so scary. 

"And so you'd be stuck in a place you _jumped out of a window in Avengers Tower_ to avoid, and we'd be stuck with you. And there would be no one left to feed the chickens. So, no, you will _not_ be the one to infiltrate SHIELD." Phil was staring down at Clint now, evidently set on pinning him in place with just his eyes, as if he could keep Clint from slipping away and doing something idiotic just through the power of his stare.

Damn thing was, it was working. Clint should look away while he had any willpower left. He knew he should. It was just... they were... things were _moving_ in that gaze, more than just the way Phil's lashes quivered, and Clint wanted to wait forever, just to see what surfaced.

"Someone has to go, though," Skye said, when she evidently felt the staring contest between the two had gone on long enough. "Is it going to be you?"

"I'd really prefer not," Phil sighed at last, and looked away from Clint, who promptly gulped in air and slumped down. "But unless Clint can think of someone else we could find and send, or unless you can think of a way to do this by remote after all, I'm afraid we don't have much choice." 

Clint didn't even bother to look back up at him, because Phil's voice already wasn't half so reluctant as it ought to be.

"You realize that route just ends up with us all in the Fridge again, right?" he asked instead, looking up at Skye. Her eyes were dark as her gaze darted between them, but she nodded at Clint in assent, her chin determined. _What a happy dysfunctional conspiracy we make._ Phil shifted behind him, knees brushing his shoulder again, and Clint fought to keep from being soothed-- or aroused, this being the time and place for neither.

"I don't think," Phil started, and no, that was the thing, he clearly _wasn't_ thinking, and someone had to.  
"I swear Phil," Clint found himself growling as he turned and stood to glare down at the man, "If any one of the next words out of your mouth is 'expendable,' I am hitchhiking to the mainland. You're not crawling through SHIELD's ventilation shafts if I'm not. We find another way." His scowl might have owed just a little bit to the thoroughly distracting image of Phil in black tac gear, his beard making him entirely guerrilla-like, shimmying his way through the main shaft that passed over the cafeteria, thighs and shoulders and ass all in motion. Whatever; the scowl was working.

"Okay," Phil said, and Clint had the distinct feeling he was being _managed_. "We find another way. But our options are pretty limited. If one of us ends up having to go, maybe we _can_ find a way to just walk in through the front door. A legitimate reason to be in SHIELD. Skye, you figure out _exactly_ what you need access to, to get this data, and give us specs. Clint and I will spend some time discussing SHIELD, and logistics, and see if we can't come up with an alternate solution."

Then he picked his congealing breakfast up off the ground next to him, and took a big bite of toast. 

 

**Two**

"Don't you walk away from me, I'm not finished with you," Agent Victoria Hand called, as she burst through the locker room door that had swung shut behind Natasha not a moment ago. Her manicured hands parted the big doors like Moses parting the Red Sea, and her stride was as sure. This was one of the reasons Natasha had always rather admired Agent Hand; there was never any doubt in anyone's mind that she was a badass, from the tips of her heels to the top of her magenta-streaked head. Even here, in the middle of a crowd of half-dressed superheroes caught in mid suit-up, she had no doubt of her righteousness. "You of all people know better than to antagonize somebody like Ian Quinn without planning and good backup. You had no authority, no cause, and you've put SHIELD in a very delicate place. You will get on that yacht again over my dead body." 

“It _will_ be over your dead body if you don’t get out of her way, Agent Hand,” Iron Man said. He loomed behind Victoria Hand-- herself not short-- and the little slits in the helmet of his red and gold armor were focused down on the Agent. (Privately, Natasha wondered if Tony was employing the repulsors to get an inch or so of lift off the ground in order to loom more effectively.) Both Natasha and Hand looked over at him and rolled their eyes.

“Tony--” Natasha said firmly, and deliberately picked up and began checking her various knives as she spoke, “Thank you, but no. I am more than capable of suiting up and getting chewed out at the same time.” That earned her an actual half-smile from Victoria Hand, although the woman didn’t step away from her locker.

When JARVIS had sent the call to assemble a few minutes ago, it had come as a relief, since she was in the middle of being yelled at by their SHIELD liaison. Natasha had always liked Victoria Hand, even though she and Clint had gotten on like oil and water. As an Agent, Hand was competent, reliable, and utterly ruthless. She _was_ the System, in essence. She wasn’t the one to go in absolutely against orders to bring you out-- that had been Melinda May, or John Garrett (curse his vitals forever). But Strike Team Delta had never _expected_ an extraction plan, apart from Agent Felix Blake grumbling his way in after them and dragging Clint-- all right, them both-- out by the scruffs of their necks when they got into the kinds of situations you couldn’t shoot or talk your way out of. Still, Natasha was never that fond of _confrontation_ , and Hand knew it.

Hand had, in fact, been using it to her advantage, reaming out Natasha in front of both Steve and Tony.

“Do you honestly think SHIELD hasn’t already been over that boat with a fine-tooth comb, Romanov?" she had said. "We _have_. Agent Amador was there personally. Do you think you somehow know better than the rest of SHIELD, than Fury’s hand-picked investigators?” 

Well, yes, she did. And she was right, and Victoria Hand knew this as well, given how she had winced as she said it. _On whose behalf is this little playlet being produced?_

“ _I_ think she does,” Tony’d interjected, before Steve’s glare had silenced him.

“Agent Hand--” Steve had started, and the alarm went off. Which, again, was a relief, since if those two couldn’t pipe down, Natasha would never get to hear the end of Hand’s spiel, and it was proving at least mildly enlightening. What was she to do, however, when the rest of the team made a race for their lockers (or, in Tony’s case, his remote activation bracelets)?

The addition of a suited, steamed Agent of SHIELD in a room more designed for easy and HAZMAT-approved sluicing down than comfort, clearly annoyed Steve, Sam, and Thor, but Natasha had little attention to spare for them. She pulled on her sleek black tac suit while listening to Hand berate her for her unusually sloppy behavior on the yacht.

Of course, sloppiness in itself was a tactic, and Natasha knew Victoria Hand knew that as well as she did. It was especially useful when you wanted all the attention directed on _you_ without making your interest obvious. Even Victoria Hand, who would probably rather break a leg than her dignity, had used that tactic in the past. 

Natasha fought the faint smile threatening to overtake her lips; even after the bitterness of the fall of the Triskelion, there was a sweet tang to a well-played game of "I know you know but do you know that I know that you know" that satisfied like nothing else she'd ever found. The Avengers were her team, her family, her home, but Victoria Hand understood her better there than any of them. (Clint excepted, of course. But it was Clint's fault she was starving for it.) 

Natasha was finished dressing now, Steve was already in full Captain America gear, and was starting to puff and loom menacingly behind Hand. Sam Wilson had nearly used up his arsenal of wry looks, and had just finished strapping his wings on.

“I promise never to be seen around Quinn’s yacht again,” Natasha said, turning to Agent Hand, who frowned at her. _Yes, we know each other well_ Natasha thought. _You caught the grammar there._ “And I promise to not, as you suggest, cause unnecessary scandal. If you don’t need me anymore, I’m afraid there’s an apocalyptic giant squid cult in San Jose that needs our attention.”

\----

She ought to have known that wasn’t the end of the unpleasantness. They were no sooner on the Quinjet, with Hand safely back at Avengers Tower ensconced in the situation room, than she was double-teamed by Tony and Steve. Or, perhaps, caught between the two of them. 

“What I don’t understand,” Steve said, leaning over the back of the pilot’s seat to watch Natasha as she navigated, “is why you had to be so public about it. You’re usually a lot more subtle. You couldn’t find _any_ way to do your searching… quietly? If you needed a diversion, you know you could have come to me.”

“The hell, Cap?” Tony’s voice, altered as it was by the Iron Man armor, held a level of burr that suggested only stormy things ahead. Natasha turned towards her instruments and frowned heavily at them. _Not getting in the way of that_.

“What, Tony?”

“Are you _encouraging_ her? This is worse than pointless, and you know it!”

“What is she supposed to do, Tony? Just abandon Clint? _Natasha_?”

“Is it Natasha you’re really worried about here, or you, Cap? Because no one expects Nat to abandon him, that’s why you’re supposed to _stop_ her, not help her. Unless you’re afraid people will think _you_ abandoned him.”

“I don’t-- Tony, for the love of Pete, if you even suggest… _I’m_ not the one who suggested he could have actually betrayed us, here.”

“I follow the facts, Steve! I followed them _all the way into SHIELD’s secure servers_ and back out in a frankly fairly impressive fashion, and I did it without alerting SHIELD or the media or anything-- is that subtle enough for you? I just don’t feel the need to pass some kind of bizarre public loyalty test."

“Good thing you're not trying, isn't it?”

“I will throw you both off this plane, so help me I will, and I don't even care if you never get to California.”

Natasha smiled a little to herself as Sam shoved himself between Tony and Steve and glared them both down. The metal wings folded across his back and the facial vee of his mask combined to give him the air of an infuriated eaglet. After a long moment, Tony flipped his face plate closed and Steve snorted then ducked his head. They both melted back to separate corners of the cargo hold just before Natasha thought she really was going to end up two Avengers short on the way to San Jose. “What the hell is with those two lately? I thought they’d mended fences and made buds” he muttered to Natasha, and she snorted, well aware that Sam had pitched his voice to carry while sounding private. "If Bruce had been here, we'd all be Avengers jelly painting the inside of the plane by now."

This, Natasha felt, was a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics of Bruce, but one Bruce tended to encourage, for the sake of a quiet life (for him). As it was, he was in Kamchatka, chasing down-- so Tony said-- some persistent remnant of AIM's Extremis formula. And also probably sitting in a field of mountain wildflowers and meditating while Siberian stoats shuffled quietly about to sit at his feet. Or something. If the point was to keep his base-level tension down, the plan was a good one. However, Natasha couldn't help but noticing that everyone argued at a slightly lower decibel when he was around. She missed him.

“We’re all under stress,” she said quietly to Sam, and flipped on the autopilot before turning to him. “And I’m not helping.” One of the joys of Sam Wilson was that she _could_ just say these things around him, and his only reaction would be just what he was doing now, a roll-shouldered shrug as if he were an actual duck shaking water off his back. And maybe he was; certainly his presence had been a stroke of genius on Steve’s part, however it came about. Where she was honestly too damn tired, and preoccupied, to be her usual underhanded, team-smoothing self, Sam had taken over the role. And now he was picking up Bruce's role, being the calming presence. Even his chosen outfit seemed designed to soothe ruffled feathers; white and red and about as far from the uniform of a soldier as you could get and still fight a battle. Tony appreciated the flair-- and possibly the fact that they all coordinated now.

As the Falcon he had already started to slip into Hawkeye's role as eyes-up-high, and as Sam he'd replaced Clint as the go-to guy for prying brooding teammates out of isolation and annoying them into good humor. Somehow, whenever Steve started to look oppressed, he’d end up in the middle of Central Park, with Clint doing his best impression of an actual Disney princess. Sam wasn't half so _frustrating_ about the whole affair, he tended to run Steve around Central Park until he'd collapsed and Steve was in a better mood. Clint's tactics had suited him perfectly, though, as Sam's suited _him_. Natasha liked Sam. 

She just wanted Clint back. 

If Clint’s disappearance had created the cracks in the Avengers, it was his _absence_ that was widening them. She and Sam could paper over them all they wanted. Unless she found _something_ concrete about Clint, everything beneath was going to crumble one of these days soon.

"Yeah, well," Sam muttered, and leaned over the co-pilot's seat awkwardly, trying to keep his wing-pack from bumping into things, "you're cute enough to get away with it. Victoria Hand, not so much. How much you want to bet the thing that gets those two to agree on somethin' for a change is when they decide to boot her ass out the door?"

"It's hardly her fault we're all overtired and distressed. And it's not their decision to make, it's Fury's." Which was not, Natasha knew, the same thing as disagreeing with him. "And unless we really want to break ties with SHIELD, we need a liaison."

"Do we need ties to SHIELD?" Sam was looking past her out the cockpit window now, and Natasha waited, and waited some more, until he finally glanced back at her, before giving him what she'd privately catalogued as Enigmatic Grimace No. 5, with a twist of Ironic Eyebrow. (Or what Clint called her “Quit Playin’” look.)

"Would you feel better or worse if there was no one in that situation room?" she asked when his carefully blank expression had crumpled at the edges.

"Did all right when we took down HYDRA." 

"Kind of demolished the Triskelion and flooded large parts of DC, too," Natasha reminded him, and turned back to her controls to check their altitude as they headed out over the Catskills.

"Kind of," he said, and sighed. "But at least we didn't have to deal with this bullshit."

"You served, Sam. The one constant truth of this world is that there is always bullshit. Choose your preferred brand of bullshit and put your head down, and go."

That stirred a laugh from him.

"I remember Clint telling me that, back down in that bunker just after we found out Fury was alive. You get that from him or he get that from you?"

"I'm Russian, he grew up in the circus, how do you know we didn't each come by it independently?"

"Basis of your friendship, huh?" Natasha jerked her head away at that, stared down at the clouds whipping by below her.

"Perhaps," she said. 

 

**Three**

It was because this section of town was all rental beach houses, and therefore supposed to be pretty much deserted, that Kate was taken _quite_ so off-guard to see America stepping out of one of the little cottages and squinting up into the high mid-day sun. Her face tilted up like a sunflower following along, and she breathed deeply and closed her eyes, and Kate was suddenly _furious_.

It had been only a day or two since America had found her in the little forest, while she was talking with Frank Barney about archery. Only a day or two since America had followed her all the way back to Central, and down the street, hissing at her about how keeping a low profile and keeping out of trouble seemed to be a bit at odds with meeting men two decades older than her in the woods.

"We were just talking about archery," did not placate America, and "I am quite capable of taking care of myself," was even worse-- especially since Kate herself felt the justice in America's words. _There was a time when you couldn't take care of yourself in the woods_ after all. But... that had been a different era, a time Before Archery. Had, in fact, been _why_ Kate had first cajoled her father into letting her take martial arts. After that, she never feared walking in the woods. But then the aliens had come to Manhattan, and Kate had nearly died when one of their space-whale things sideswiped a building, and her hands and her feet and her kicks had not helped her.

As she'd run, she'd caught sight of a silhouette high on a rooftop, bow in hand, and watched the aliens on their sleds fall from the sky like mistimed fireworks as he shot. 

And that was zero year in the era After Archery, and in the three years since she'd watched the world change, and the Avengers change the currents of history time after time, and she'd grown... _itchy_ , until she was _so_ restless, so _cramped_ , that when she'd met three young men trying to prevent a robbery, she'd introduced herself... and eventually, America had come and glowered at them, and joined them.

But After America was not an era. It was just... kind of a _thing_ , and America didn't get to yell at her for enjoying herself, for _once_ in a discreet fashion. All she'd been doing anyway was talking with an, okay, admittedly old, but very _very_ attractive man with the kind of beard that made you want to bring him into a nice barber shop and get him a straight-razor shave, before you took him around to a tailor to have a suit made. Kind of a Crododile George of the Wilderness type, or else a really superannuated hipster. (Except not even the beard-iest of hipsters had shoulders _like that_. No straight girl on the _planet_ could be faulted for wanting to spend time around those shoulders.) 

All they'd been doing was talking _archery_ , and Kate had been _ravenous_ for someone who would do that with her. Someone who saw her shoot and _understood_ she was exceptional, and didn't ask when she was finally going to grow up and go off to college, or take a break year in Europe, or _something_ my _God_ , Katherine. 

Someone who didn't, either, ask when she was going to come back to Manhattan and to Billy and Teddy and Eli and herself and back to the old warehouse where they practiced, and get them all into trouble that they-- unlike she-- could not buy their way out of. 

She and America had parted badly that day, and every day since Kate had walked the silent streets of the summer cottages, down to the dunes where she'd scuffle along on the sand. When she looked behind her every half block, it was only to make sure America _wasn't_ there. Whenever she braced herself at a silhouette in the distance, it was just because you never knew who might be wandering around for _less than innocent_ purposes. Certainly she wasn't expecting or wanting America to find her.

And so, no, coming on America like this, when it might look to an untrained eye, like Kate had been _looking for her_? Was not all right. Perhaps if she stood very still, America would walk away and not see... America was turning towards her, and her hair was glinting and floating and all kinds of stupid things. Her face, when she saw Kate, utterly transformed, hope growing on it. And she walked forward, and her hips swayed in that unfair little way they did, and her head tilted and somehow-- Kate had no idea how-- that drew attention to the curve of her breasts under her little cropped jean jacket. 

That wasn’t the disturbing part. Kate had always been objective enough to recognize that America was beautiful; that was just aesthetic appreciation. It’d be silly to try and deny that those breasts were just about _perfect_ , or that America’s lips were soft and full.

No, the disturbing part was how easy it would be for Kate to just _bury_ her head there, drag her lips up America's collarbone to her jaw, to her mouth, and kiss the _hell_ out of her and that. Was. Absolutely. Utterly. Totally. In _fur_ iating. 

_I refuse. This isn't happening._

Kate stood in the center of the road, heat curling and pooling in her gut and her jeans becoming more and more... _uncomfortable_... with every step America took, and didn't think there was any possible way America could _not_ tell from her face what was happening in her panties. 

_No. No, no, no. Please don't let her see._

Kate did the only thing she could. The logical thing.

She bolted.

**Four**

They were hip-deep in salt marsh, and Lucky sat on dry ground watching them forlornly as they made their way down a cut in the cropgrass that ran parallel to the shore. Clint was moving slowly, tracing the line of a cable with a hooked pole, bringing it up and searching for breaks. Every so often brackish water sloshed over the tops of his waders and darkened the seat of his jeans. Phil shuffled along behind him, keeping his eyes conspicuously off Clint's rear, and happy, for once, not to be the one who'd spend the rest of the night with a heating pack on his back to work out the knots brought on by hunching over all day.

"If there are no breaks between here and the attenuators," Phil said quietly, when watching the play of sunlight in the short-cropped hair at the nape of Clint's neck and along his jaw had grown unbearable, "then the only place left to check is the power plant, and we'll do that after lunch. D'you want me to take over looking?"

"Nah," Clint shrugged, and rolled his shoulders in a way that made Phil very grateful for the roominess of his _own_ waders, "I'm doin' all right. Is this the last of the repairs?"

"Should be. I heard from Skye," he said, and watched Clint's back stiffen briefly, before he went back to his checks. 

"Good news?"

"Not... really. Not the worst, though. She's figured out how to build a device that will pick up and spoof an internal server network, just by proximity. I'm not sure whether _she_ needs to tell the device what to do, or if it just kind of nets everything and we sort it later, but the person who goes in just has to _be_ near the security offices for five minutes."

"Unfortunately they are nowhere near the entrance," Clint said, "so playing Candygram isn't going to work." 

"Do you know where they are?" Phil asked, and was mostly relieved when Clint shrugged in assent.

"I wish I could say it's complicated and you have to let me go in, but it really isn't. They've got Security's suites tucked in just in back of IT, and HR backing them--everything got muddled when they were making New York the new HQ, and apparently the cheapest way to go was to stuff everything that needed internal networks into one area. I don't suppose we could just _send_ the stupid chip there, like mail it, and then Skye could work her magic?"

"Where would we mail it that it wouldn't get blown up?"

"HR," Clint said promptly, and shook eelgrass and goo off a section of line. "Or Fiscal Services. Or Requisitions. They're all huge and they get all kinds of weird stuff. Stands to reason-- agents in the field usually do _not_ have time for properly cross-referenced invoices and expense requests. I sent in one emergency request that was basically a mangled arrow-head taped to a bit of cardboard, and it said ‘gimme fifty more of these.’ 'Course Strike Team Delta was horrible-- even our old SO once sent in a request to change his life insurance policy, written on the back of a poster for a bhangra dance night in Kashmir. Though that might have been him showboating a bit to protest our mission specs. At any rate, nothing phases those guys."

"And you told us you didn't get logistics," Phil said warmly, and Clint tilted his head back and laughed.

"Fair enough. No, but half those guys have been in the field, so they know what's up. Hell, even the _Cavalry_ seems to have washed up down there. And I remember when she came off the field."

"Oh?" Clint's mood might have been simple reminiscence, or he might have been attempting to avoid the subject, either way, Phil wasn't going to shut him up. All the time he'd spent talking about SHIELD or the Avengers up till now, it had been with the slightly wary tone of a man no longer sure if he was about to step into quicksand. This easy ramble was _fascinating_... and it was giving him ideas. 

"Yeah. Melinda May. Horrible op in Bahrain. She shut down, wanted out of the field, and I guess that's where they sent her. Made my blood cold, seeing my paid time off request come back with her name on it. Glad she was there when we had to take HYDRA down, though. They prized logistics just as much as you do, I think, 'cause there were a shit-ton of them in the support functions. May almost single-handedly secured her floor-- no one got past her to help the HYDRA strike teams."

Phil's blood was running cold, too, but largely because he thought he was starting to see a way out of their dilemma, and Clint wasn't going to like it one bit.

Someone was, indeed, going to walk right in SHIELD's front door.

"Hey, Phil," Clint's voice, hesitant all of a sudden, broke Phil out of his planning. He'd turned around and was facing Phil, one hand rubbing the back of his neck nervously. With his beard and exposed skin tawny in the bright light, he once again looked eerily like Lucky. "Do we have to have this fight right this minute?"

"What fight?" Phil asked, confused.

"The one that's going to happen in a minute when we both admit that we can't just mail the chip in, and one of the two of us has to go." 

"Ah," Phil said, "that one." He shrugged, looking down for a moment at the water, at his own face reflected on the surface, wrinkled and half-obliterated by the sun. No, he didn't want to have that fight yet, either. "Let's go home, we can pick this up after lunch," he said instead, waving at the salt marsh-- though he doubted the gesture fooled Clint for a moment. He held a hand out to Clint, to help reel him back to shore.

It was only when Clint took it, his palm warm and slimy and calloused as it gripped Phil's, that Phil realized he was being silly. No superhero was going to need help wading back through a stand of cropgrass, after all. Still, Clint took his sweet time letting go. They made their way back to solid ground, grass beating at their chests as they left new trails through the marsh. 

"I'm not trying to start the fight," Phil said slowly, after a minute, "but... just so you know? It wouldn't be my first time either."

"Mmm," Clint hummed non-committally, then glanced up at him, the set of his face unreadable. "This that Rangers stuff you never talk about?"

Phil shrugged. 

"Yes? I... look, the '90s weren't exactly a high-deployment time, according to the historical record. Somalia, Haiti-- almost-- and Kosovo after I left. But... that's the official line. I was in Kosovo years before it was popular," he said, and Clint's shoulder brushed his briefly. "And... other places. On detached service, working with the alphabet agencies sometimes," Phil shrugged.

"You were black ops," Clint summarized for him.

"Kind of. Gray ops, maybe. Inter- _agency_ cooperation," Phil was surprised how bitter the emphasis came out, and put it down to having to disentangle himself from a hummock as he talked. "Once in a while the Army and some agency would both have interest in clearing out a threat in some of the places we’d been to or thought we’d be going to. Nothing up to your level. But my platoon got requested a few times and got ourselves a reputation-- me and my partner Holly in particular."

"Rangers have partners?" Clint asked, his voice light. "News to me."

"Romantic partner," Phil said, and rolled his eyes. "Boyfriend, which makes no sense to use in reference to an Army Ranger. Anyway," because changing the subject seemed like a good idea just at the moment, "I'm not a complete neophyte. If it ends up being me." _Which it damn well will._

"Okay, well, I'll remember that when we start arguing. But, go back to the boyfriend bit," Clint said, turning towards him and making little rewind gestures with his hands. 

"Nope," Phil said, "not relevant to the discussion. Long dead." _And no-one you're likely to be in a position to worry about, anyway._

"Ouch. Sorry I asked," Clint said, reaching out to lay a hand on his arm, and Phil concentrated-- hard-- on the green blades of grass thumping against his chest, as if they could explain the sudden tightness there. "On one of those missions?"

"No, much later; I wasn't there. I didn't know until long after." _This must be how clams feel in a clambake_ Phil thought. _The pressure cracking you, leaving you defenseless, exposing all your glup for anyone who wants to swallow you whole._

"Ah," was the entirety of Clint's response, and Phil attempted to sort himself back into some kind of internal order. If this was a precursor of their fight, he was never going to survive it. They walked in silence for a while, up onto solid ground, and Lucky ran to meet them, slobbering all over their already-slimy hands. 

"Phil?" Clint said, from behind him, as Phil was reaching down to rub Lucky's belly. "Just so you know, I promise to try not to go off and die on you."

Even with the light squinting his eyes nearly shut, Clint's gaze was enough to freeze Phil in place. He was standing just at the edge of the marsh, in too-big waders, with one shoulder strap slipping down the curve of his arm, like he himself was half-shucked. Behind him, around him, the green marsh grass and the brown muck, the blue of the sky behind his head, made him look as if he'd half grown out of salt marsh himself. Like something returning that Phil hadn't known he'd left behind, maybe. 

His hand left Lucky's belly at some point, pressed and slipped on his knees as he tried to straighten up, to face that gaze directly. Clint waited for him, still and steady, and Phil hesitated for a moment, caught between reaching out for those straps, or just walking forward.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Kate Bishop said behind him, "is this a bad time?"

**Five**

Chowder was simmering on the stove; a simple re-heat, but Phil didn't trust bivalves to the microwave. At any rate, Clint was going to be occupied long past lunchtime with the Bishop girl, that much was obvious. They were already out trekking the island, looking for places to set up targets. Phil wondered whether it was even worth hoping that Clint would remain Frank Barney to her past the first five minutes once the shooting started.

Of the risks Clint could be taking, though, Phil was going to concede this one. He was going to concede it in spite of the extraordinarily duplicitous way in which Clint had _promised_ him not to imprint any more strange young women, and then gone directly out and seduced one into visiting their island with her bow. 

For one thing, of all the teenage prodigies Clint could have chosen, one who was so transparently protective of Hawkeye that she kept giving Phil himself sour looks merely because he'd spoken invidiously of the Avenger once in a bar, was not someone who was likely to turn Clint in. If anything, Kate Bishop's Hawkeye obsession was more likely to cause them trouble if it _wasn't_ contained and channelled some way.

Phil himself wouldn't have made the connection between Kate Bishop and the mysterious Hawkeye of the Met Gala, but if Clint saw it, Phil was more than willing to bet it was true. It would explain why Papa Bishop had exiled her to the Trashcan-- he was probably in high damage-control mode back in Manhattan. Or no, his lawyers probably were. And it made sense of her question in the Blue Peter that night-- now that Hawkeye was gone, who was going to do what he did? _Someone had to stand up, all right._

The girl might not have _sense_ , but there was no denying she was _brave_ , and Phil was uncomfortably aware of how similar her actions were in impulsive recklessness to those of a certain other Hawkeye he knew, who'd jumped out of Avenger's Tower not so long back.

There was certainly a risk in having a known Hawkeye associate with a fugitive Hawkeye, but it paled in comparison to the risk of having the known Hawkeye burst out into ill-directed vigilantism down here on Long Beach Island, and the media circus that would follow.

So on the whole, there was method behind Clint's madness, beyond what Phil was morally certain was an almost unendurable itchiness in Clint's palms at the sight of her bow.

And anyway, for another thing, Phil had no room to talk about duplicitousness at the moment. Not when he was currently about to do something that, if Phil were Clint, he would probably find well-nigh unforgivable. 

His own palms itched as he leaned over his laptop, currently set out on the butcher block counter between the loaf of bread he'd been cutting for lunch, and the remains of a block of cheddar. The chowder bubbled fitfully behind him, smelling of brine and butter, and Phil closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and started to type. 

_Dear Melinda,_ he wrote in the body of the email.

A scrape from the kitchen doorway had him spinning, his hand already coming around to slam the laptop closed. 

It was only a chicken, the little black hen that Phil refused to call Tasha, come stepping delicately into the house to watch him.

"This is no place for a chicken," he told her, and she glanced up at him and then pecked at a crack in the flooring. "Even if I did leave the door open," _Unless that bird's learned how to work doorknobs, which seems unlikely._ She clucked happily to herself, digging out a breadcrumb, and Phil shook his head. His heart was only just starting to slow down, now that he realized he'd only been caught by an avian, not an archer.

"Let's keep this our little secret, just until I get it finished, okay?" he asked her, as she attacked the edge of the rag rug in the doorway. "Clint can kill me when he finds out, but he can't stop me if it's already done."

Rag rug vanquished, Tasha strutted over to Phil, laid a considering eye on him, and pecked at his bootlace.

"Yes well, you're a chicken. You don't get a say." He shooed her gently back out onto the porch, and closed the screen door carefully behind her, and turned back to his laptop.

 _I won't apologize for never writing, because I never promised to._ he wrote. _Neither did you, of course. And, since you always did dislike pro-forma polite time-wasting, I'll skip over all the "how are you doing, did you evers" and get straight to the point._

 _Assuming you still work for That One Agency, or that if you don't, you'll still know somebody who_ does _, I've got a proposition for you. And yes, I'm well aware of how hypocritical this will make me sound, after Orlat._

He typed for a while longer before stepping away and wiping his hands on his jeans. _This is the best thing for all of us._ The steam from the chowder hit him as he turned, and he took a moment to pepper it, sip it, let it scald his tongue, before he couldn't delay any longer.

 _"Thanks,"_ he typed, _Phil "Cheese" Coulson_. 

He held his breath, and hit Send.

\----

To be continued....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Chapter: Fallout, falling chickens, some archery, and more fallout. 
> 
> This week's [ tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/95038588741/washed-ashore-chapter-8-dead-reckoning-kathar) is the link to the real-life version of Gansett Light, and the playground from Scene 1.
> 
> You guys, I missed you all so much. The vacation was good for this writer, and even better for this story, but it feels so good to be posting again. You owe more than the usual thanks to [Faeleverte](http://archiveofourown.org/users/faeleverte/pseuds/faeleverte) and Beta J this week, the one beta-ing through dental pain, the other through the start-up to a new job. They are both amazing and I love them to bits and you should too.


	9. Sudden Shoaling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fallout, falling chickens, frustrated archers, another skeleton from Phil’s closet, and Clint wouldn’t want you to take this the wrong way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: no chickens were harmed in the making of this chapter.
> 
> Scene One has a fair amount of Matt Fraction dialogue sprinkled in, from “Young Avengers Presents” #6. 
> 
> Settle in; this one runs long.

**One**

They were beautiful, the bow and its archer: the way they sent arrows in long, curving arcs upwards or slipped them through the air like they were slicing straight through the ribs of time. It almost hurt to watch Kate Bishop shoot, and Clint had more than once slipped briefly away to search out some new, more perfect spot for her to set up a range. 

At last, they'd settled on the hill between the mansion and the mainland-- too distant from the water for any casual boaters to see, and high enough to give plenty of warning should company arrive. The tangled remains of a rose garden flanked one end, now withered with the onset of autumn, rosehips poking out like blood spots. The other end held a little trampled-earth path that led by a circuitous route along the flank of the island to the power plant, and from there to the salt marsh that fringed the northwestern part of the island. Clint had carefully taken Kate only by the southern portion, with the abandoned New Boathouse and the dock Skye had arrived at, and the eastern portion with its spit that ran out along the northern edge of Long Beach Island itself, nearly to the open sea. This was where Phil's little cottage sat, just below the spit. Beyond it, up the northern beach, sat the concrete bunker. It faced the deserted barrier island to the north. Clint already thought of this as the private face of North Bar, one that had been invaded too often recently.

Kate hadn't been paying much attention to the ground during the walk; he found her looking back up at him far more often than he honestly thought he was worth. 

_I know I'm a mystery, girly-girl, but you'll never get anywhere if you don't look where you're going._

All was explained, or so he thought, when she finally pulled her shoulders straight and puffed herself up to speak. _Awkward question ahead_ was written all over her face.

_Ah, fuck, am I that recognizable still?_

"So," she said, elaborately nonchalant, "kissing cousins, then?"

For a long moment, the component words of the question didn't make any _sense_. Not until Clint remembered just what she'd interrupted between him and Phil in the salt marsh. _And just what_ did _she interrupt, hm, self? What even possessed you to say that to him? Nothing like making promises you can't keep._

"No," Clint spluttered. "No. Definitely _not_ kissing cousins." 

"Good," she said, and nodded her head firmly. "Because he's an asshole."

And then she lined up her first shot, and Clint lost a little bit of his heart.

 _Holy fuck, I have a live one here._

He let her do that a while, charm him with her accuracy and her rosy little recurve and the snap of her smile. Let her get right down and comfortable, before he said anything. When he did talk, it was to praise her bow. She handed it over shyly and he tested its draw weight, looked lovingly over the blonde limbs and red riser, gave it back, and waited till she was putting an arrow to the string before he asked her:

"Was this the one you used at the Met Gala?"

She went stiff, back arched a little, arrow already nocked, and only her eyes moved around to glare at him.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said, and Clint laughed.

"It's _possible_ there's another archer out there who could make that shot, in an evening dress, and who's a brunette. I'm not holding my breath, though. If you want to keep a low profile, girly-girl, best not be defending Hawkeye's fallen honor in every bar on the island."

"It's not _every_ bar," she groused, then turned, aimed and loosed her arrow defiantly. It hit the center of the target he'd tacked up over a large old stump and vibrated.

"But was it this bow? Or where the hell did you get one on such short notice? Because you sure as hell didn't come prepared to stop a robbery using trick archery." 

She was blushing now, but still glaring through it, both hands wringing the riser of her bow. 

"Of course not," she snapped. "I thought it'd be obvious, given it was a gala for the opening of the Heroes of New York exhibit. Hawkeye's bow from the Battle of Manhattan was in one of the displays. I used _it_."

She'd used _it_. Of course she had. Clint had gladly given it up when the Met had asked. Not the least because Tony had promised to make him a better and Clint had enough damned bows that he could give one up to go under glass. He'd used that bow last at the Triskelion. It hurt his heart to draw it, anymore. But what he didn't think he'd done was loosen up the draw weight any before giving it up. 

"Oh, it was a little stiff," she shrugged, when he put the question to her. "But I made it work." 

A little stiff. On a bow that had a hundred pound draw weight minimum. Jesus fucking _Christ_ but he was keeping this one, and Phil be damned. 

"That detail wasn't in the papers," Clint said, and got another shrug for his trouble.

"I got away clean and left the bow behind. Anyway, Daddy sits on the Met board," she said as if it explained everything. And perhaps it did; Clint knew how that worked.

"And Daddy doing clean-up is why you're down here," he said quietly, to yet another shrug, and she turned to shoot another arrow, for all the world looking like she didn't care what he said next. "Staying out of trouble."

The arrow was not _really_ wide when it hit the target. She scowled at it anyway. 

"I'm not some little girl that needs to be protected," she said.

"No," he agreed. "You're someone who uses Hawkeye's bow to foil robbers. So I can only imagine you're down here cooling your heels to protect someone else." She whipped her head around, and her eyes were dark as thunderclouds. "So... if you're trying to lay low, maybe you should work on that temper of yours in public."

"What do you care?" she asked. Clint shrugged, and discarded several possible responses in favor of:

"I don't, much. But someone like you with something to prove can make it awfully messy for the locals, if you get your name in enough papers."

"What do you think I was trying to prove?" Her voice was petulant, but she didn't have another arrow nocked, so Clint figured he was safe for a moment.

"That you're as good as Hawkeye," he said. 

"Hah! God, you sound just like Dad."

"Do I?"

"No one, no one is as good as Hawkeye was. That's the _point_. But since he's gone, _somebody_ had to be out there, doing what he does. So I did." As if it were just that goddamned simple, in the end.

Actually... actually, Clint figured, that was probably exactly what he would have done, in her circumstances. _Doing what I do, indeed_. 

"And now you're down here. Hiding." He looked over at the tight cluster of arrows in the center of the target, then back at her. She had one last arrow to hand, and was sighting carefully along it, trying to keep a blank face. _Like I'm one to throw stones._ The devil came over him, or at least a decent-sized imp. "What now, gonna split one down the middle?" he asked.

"Oh come on," she huffed back at him. "No one makes that shot. I don’t care how good you are."

"Oh yeah? And why not?"

"Because it’s impossible, that’s why. I _know_ okay? Everyone knows. Even the Mythbusters couldn’t do it." _What the hell are you playing at_ her face said. He grinned.

"C'mon, try it one time."

"I can't make the shot. Why bother?"

"Listen, Kate, I don’t want to get all life-coach on you, but you're gonna miss each and every shot you can’t be bothered to take," he told her. 

"Oh yeah? _You_ do it, then." 

For a brief moment, Clint thought the bow was already in his hands, they itched so _damned_ much. Then he caught sight of her raised chin, the uncertainty riding in her eyes. _Right. No spooking the filly._

"Some other time. Got to give you something to come back here for, Katie-Kate."

"I _thought_ so," she snorted, and turned back to the target, loosing the last arrow near the upper edge of the tight cluster, then flouncing off to collect them.

He left her to it, the beautiful girl and her beautiful bow, before he succumbed to temptation. All he did was reiterate the offer to come any time. And when she asked him why, he only said:

"Because you're as good as Hawkeye. Well. Almost. Hawkeye'd take that shot."

**Two**

Skye was in the henhouse when he found them, agitating the chickens.

"You know there's a little hatch on the side, for you to get the eggs out," Clint said as he walked up to her, or rather, as he walked up to her behind where it poked out of the coop door. She backed out, an egg in each hand, and glared at him. 

"I _know_ that," she said. "But Tasha's been laying eggs under _neath_ the roosts, and Phil over there made me go in after." Clint looked over at Phil, who shrugged back at him from where he was leaning on the corner of the fence.

"I am old, and an auntie, a very old, timid auntie. Given that fact, I clearly should not be going in after chickens myself." Phil looked like approximately nobody's vision of a timid old auntie, what with the way he was doing that Irish fisherman thing again, with his beard and his sleeves pushed up and his eyes twinkling in the sun. Clint looked over at Skye, and raised an eyebrow. There was a chicken, the riotous little golden-laced Wyandotte so dark it was nearly red, eyeing her from the entrance to the henhouse, and when she stepped backwards, it clucked angrily at her, and flapped. She ignored it in favor of raising an eyebrow right back at them both.

"You knew what I meant at the time," she told Phil, and held the eggs out to him. He straightened and took them solemnly from her. "I can take care of my own self. And _you_ are a big fat hypocrite." 

"Clearly, I missed something besides the chowder at lunch," Clint said, and came into the yard, closing the gate behind him just before the same chicken that had warned Skye off could make a break for freedom. He glanced down at the bird, who was glaring up at him. 

"No naming," Phil reminded him, and Clint looked down at the chicken again. Beady, defiant little eyes glared back from the little golden body with the black edging like a lace overlay. _Damn that's a gaudy bird._ Skye was watching Phil, and when he didn't say anything further, she shrugged.

"The boss here keeps telling me I shouldn't be staying in my van," she said, "and I was just telling him he was being an old fuddy-duddy."

"Fuddy-duddy," Phil repeated, "I forgot that one. Hey." He looked down, where the chicken had evidently ceased harassing Clint in order to go eat Phil's shoelaces. In the shadows of the henhouse, Tasha the hen lurked. Clint deliberately turned away from her, back to Skye. Best to let that one do as she pleased.

"The old white utility van that was in the parking lot at the playground? That's yours? I'd assumed that was abandoned. Phil's not wrong." 

"Yeah, well, unless you guys are going to pay me more than you have been so far--"

"We've been paying her?" Clint turned to Phil, who shrugged. Skye rolled her eyes.

"Right. My point, gentlemen. Or aunties, whatever."

"Fuddy-duddies," Clint supplied gleefully. Between the sun and the exercise, the way his lungs finally felt light again, Kate with her bow, and Phil all ruffled under his beard, he was feeling oddly buoyant. _Maybe even the fight won't be so bad_.

"Anyway," Skye was saying, "that's not all you missed at lunch. I came over so Phil here could fill me in on his big plan."

"Oh?" Clint said, and Phil grimaced, looked down at the eggs in his hands, then up at Clint. He shifted, once, on his feet.

"You gave me the idea this morning," he said, and a lead weight started to sink in Clint's gut, dragging a line down after it to hook in his craw. "When you talked about HR being so close to the security servers. SHIELD is remarkably short-staffed, you said so yourself. I thought... I thought that it might not be the worst idea in the world to see if they'd be interested in recruiting an old soldier."

"So... you... what? You plan to send your resume in? Go undercover?" There was something sharp poking at his foot, far on the horizons of his concentration; he shook it off, and stared at Phil. The man had gone still, both eggs held in front of him, his eyes locked on Clint, as if he was trying to send something by eyelash Morse.

"Good god no, that would be a disaster. But an informational interview... it costs them nothing but a visit."

"Yeah, but, with who, again? How? Phil, that kinda thing could take weeks to set up, if you even get a hit."

"Normally, yes. But I have a contact."

"Who?" The pecking was back at his toe, and Clint shifted away, impatient. There was a rushing starting in his ears, now, too, just to add to the distractions. _I don't understand_....

"Melinda May," Phil said, just dropped it in there casually, the bastard, and Clint realized after a moment he was open mouthed. "We met a couple of times, when I was in the service. Got into and out of at least one really bad scrape together." _The Cavalry. Of course you fucking did. Screwed by my own babbling again._

“Define ‘really bad scrape’ for me, Phil,” he said, trying to buy at least a little time to right his mental landscape. Phil winced, and for a moment Clint thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then, nearly apologetically, he asked:

“Does she still refuse to eat soft-rind cheeses?”

“Never knew someone could have that much hatred for Brie. Why?” Clint asked, because he was pretty sure that, even absurd as this whole conversation was, that was a bit far afield.

“My fault, I’m afraid,” Phil said. “She swore she never would, after Orlat.” 

That, unfortunately, was a reference Clint recognized. One of several “this operation never happened” references, found on no servers anywhere anymore.

"Inter-agency cooperation," he said dumbly, and Phil nodded.

"Inter-agency cooperation."

"You meant SHIELD."

"Among others."

"What others?"

"... Mostly SHIELD, really."

More pecking, a shake, and then Skye dove at Clint's feet and grabbed the importunate little Wyandotte away. She glanced up at him warily as she retreated.

"Mostly SHIELD. You spent... how long? How many? No... never mind... why didn't you tell me?"

"It wasn't relevant 'till now?" Phil said. From the corner of the yard to which she'd backed, Skye snorted, and Phil winced. _Yeah, nobody's buying that one._

"How was it not relevant? After everything I said? After-- you knew, you _knew_ who I was, that I used to work for them. The _hell_ , Phil?"

"It... I didn't... it's a big organization, I didn't think you'd know anyone I knew, if they were even still alive-- which a lot of them aren’t. And, _Clint_ ," Something cracked at last in Phil's voice; he moved forward, holding both those stupid eggs out in supplication. "It wasn't you, it just... it was classified, and it was a long time ago, and I really didn't think, I _really_ didn't think it was relevant. Until today."

"So, okay," Clint said, because he needed to get something firm underneath him, get away from this and back to the slightly-less treacherous present, "so, what, you think May can get you an informational interview, and you'll waltz in with Skye's little trojan thingy and waltz back out with the data?"

"Essentially, yes."

"Okay," Clint nodded. Kept nodding. Eventually realized he was starting to look like one of the damned hens himself and forced his head to stop. "Okay, we can talk about it. It's a good start to that argument, anyway. A rational one."

"Except," Phil said, and Clint closed his eyes. _We're not gonna have that particular argument, I see, we're gonna do something worse_. "Except that I emailed Melinda over lunch. And she already wrote back. The interview is set for three days from now."

\----

The bow was warm in Kate's hand, the quiver hung off her back with a satisfying pull and, all in all, the world was a hell of a lot brighter than it had seemed for a while.

As long as she ignored Frank's parting shot to her. _Hawkeye'd take that shot._ Well, she _wasn't_ Hawkeye, she was just Kate Bishop, or else she'd be back in New York on a rooftop somewhere, and what the _hell_ , it was like everyone was reading from the same script these days. 

Of course, though, she _couldn't_ ignore it, because Kate's brain didn't let her have nice things for long without complicating them. Which was why she was on her way to find Mr. Frank Barney and serve it right back _at_ him. She was nearly all the way down the path to the little cottage and its shaded yard when the voices hit her.

"You son of a _bitch_ , Phil," Frank was yelling, and she rounded the last curve to see him in the chicken yard. He was red-faced behind the pale scruff, his hands fisted in the hollows of his hips, and even from this distance she could see he was quivering. "Of all the high-handed, dumb-ass, manipulative moves! What the fuck, am I just supposed to let this fucking ride? I thought we were in this _together_. Not with you going off all half-cocked and expecting me to be _grateful_. Do you think you own me now? God, were you planning this while we were... while I was... all this time?" 

"It's not like that," Phil responded, his voice rising too, breaking on the ends. He was facing Frank, gesturing vehemently with a fist cupped oddly around something, and he looked caught between anger and despair. Kate felt a little stab of schadenfreude in her gut. Framed between the two men stood a young woman clutching a golden hen with black-edged feathers, her gaze darting from one to another. And in a final bit of absurdity, a skinny black chicken sat at Frank's feet, pecking urgently at his ankle. "I know, you have every right to be angry--"

"Fuck _yeah_ I do!" Frank interjected, and Phil shook his head.

"-- but this is exactly why I did it this way. We'd have just kept going around in circles and you wouldn't have let me go. Someone had to make a decision. I did it for you, Cl-- gack!" As he was speaking, the girl had lifted her eyes and seen Kate-- and dropped the chicken. It and the little black hen it fell on exploded upwards in a feathery ball, sending Phil and Frank hurdling backwards.

In the silence that followed, both men turned to follow the girl's gaze, and blinked at Kate. 

"Ms Bishop," Phil greeted her. He looked as blank as the sand after the tide, whereas Frank was frankly bashful, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. 

"Hi," she said, and then, "hi again, Frank."

"Kate," he replied, and even his voice was blushing. "You um... I didn't expect... what can we do for you? Um, have you met Skye?" He gestured at the dark-haired girl, and suddenly her face resolved in Kate's memory. The waitress. From the Blue Peter. The one who had grabbed America and whispered in her ear, back when Kate had first met them all-- well. First berated them all. 

"I just wanted to say goodbye, and--" she hesitated, watching her little mental fantasy drain away. The one where she sashayed up to Frank Barney, placed her bow in his hands, said "I'll be back in a couple days, and I dare you to make that shot. Here, in case you need to practice," and left him looking bewilderedly after her. She couldn't say any of that to this man, not with Skye watching her and Phil over there glowering through his hermitly scruff. "And ask you for a favor," she finished.

She walked forward and held out her bow. Frank took it gently, watching her, not it, his hands wrapping around it as if she'd handed him a security blanket. 

"What?" he said. 

"Keep this for me for a little? Just... so that Cousin Emily doesn't find it?" She said, and her voice sounded too uncertain to herself. So she shrugged it and the quiver off together, and handed it over as casually as she could. "I don't need her to start on me right now."

"Yeah, sure," he said, pulling the quiver into his arms too. "I'll put 'em in the shed, there, you'll be able to get 'em anytime you need 'em." He didn't look at Phil as he said that, and Phil didn't look at him.

"Good. Oh," and she figured all those turbaned ladies on daytime tv would have loved the way she said that one, "and feel free to use it if you want. Sounds like you need the practice." That won her a snort, and an actual twinkle in Frank's eye.

"Sure thing, Katie-Kate," he said, and Skye shifted behind him. The chickens were out in force now, perhaps reinforcing their owner, or perhaps taking advantage of his momentary distraction. There were nearly a dozen of them, multi-colored, speckled, barred, solids, fat, skinny, ruffled and not. The little black hen had backed the gold-and-black one into a corner and was currently staring it down; Skye slid forward and rescued it.

"That," Kate said, "is a lot of chickens. Do they have names?"

"No," Phil replied, stirring. He was eyeing Frank now, who looked back at him with a terrible twinkle in his eye.

"None except Tasha there," Frank said, pointing to the black hen, then the gold-and-black one "--and Tony." He was talking about chickens, but he was looking straight at Phil. "I do need practice, Kate, you're right. Think I'll get some right now, if no one here has anything _else_ planned for me. I always think better with a bow in my hand." 

"I'll walk you to your boat," Skye said, "it's probably berthed right next to mine. See you tonight, Phil." As she finished, she dropped the golden hen in Phil's arms. He caught it awkwardly with his forearms, his hands still clutching two brown eggs.

Rarely, Kate thought, had she had such _interesting_ days when she came here in the summers. 

 

 

**Three**

The bow sang for him: a honeybee sound in the evening air, a rhythmic thunk in the stump backing the target. His hands had shaken at first, and all along his arms, and he put it down to the time without, to the bullet wound still healing in the flesh of his shoulder, to the unfamiliarity of the weapon. 

As he was collecting the first quiverful from the target he let the words spill out:

" _High_ -handed, _sec_ retive, _control_ ing, _mani_ pulative _jack_ ass."

Clint got the hang of it better on the second quiver; he'd gotten used to the lightness of the draw, maybe. Not that Kate's bow was strung for the weak-armed, no-- she had a fine strong arm. But he was Hawkeye. 

("Oh yeah? _You_ do it then.") 

He lost himself in the motion of nock, draw, aim, release for a while. Breath flowed in through his nostrils, out through his bow. The world darkened down towards twilight, coming over all pink at the edges.

Lucky came bounding up eventually and sat at his feet, watching the tight clusters and fancy shapes form on the target-- heart, diamond, spade, club, CFB. PJC.

Clint dropped the bow, staring through the growing gloom at the target, with its concentric rings overlaid in arrows.

"What the hell makes him think he gets to do this?" he asked Lucky, not really looking at him, as he went to pull them free. Lucky bounded at his feet, winked up at him and panted happily. "Just because I wind up half-dead on his beach, he thinks he runs my life now? Hell, if it's finders keepers, _you_ found me first, boy."

"Rowf!" Lucky agreed, and trotted back with him. Clint ran a hand over his face. 

"I mean, what the fuck, right? I didn't ask for anyone to make goddamn sacrificial plays on my behalf, and only _Phil_ would try and do it _behind my fucking back_. I'm not an invalid-- anymore, anyway. I can take care of myself, why the hell am I supposed to be the one holding back? Why does he think he gets to play high and mighty mysterious savior? He doesn't have a fucking _clue_ what he's walking into."

The arrows were in motion again, but he couldn't stop his mouth anymore.

"Is this what happens when you fuck off to a private island for fifteen years with no one to call you on your bullshit? Huh? He's out of practice with this kind of shit, and hell I don't know what he actually ever _did_ anyway. For all I know his inter-agency cooperation involved organizing _potlucks_. He's not invincible, Luck. I know he thinks he doesn't think he is, but he lies to himself. He doesn't get to take this risk with you. Or with his damned _chickens_ , or with _Skye_ goddamn it. What do we do without him?"

Half the arrows were gone. Lucky's tail was wagging, sweeping short arcs of grass into submission. 

"I'll tell you what happens if he gets caught. If this doesn't work." Clint paused a moment, staring at the target. He'd imitated the tight cluster Kate Bishop had produced earlier. "We're all stuck," he sighed. "He's off to the Fridge, and I'm stuck here a fugitive on a little island, and I have no idea if I'll be able to bring him back to you. Makes more sense if I go do it myself."

_Hawkeye would make that shot._

Would he? With a light bow, a tired arm, fading light? He sited along the arrow carefully. 

"In the end, Luck," he mumbled, and the dog stirred and whined, "what's holding me here?"

Lucky stood slowly, winking up at him, and Clint was reminded of the afternoon in the bushes, when he'd buried his cheek in dog fur, listening for Lucky's heart and praying he'd find a sign of life. Footsteps off the porch, danger leaving him, going off to meet Phil. And Phil himself, outlined in twilight, his heart in his face when he saw Clint staggering in with Lucky in his arms, the goddamn cavalry come home at last. 

If Lucky was here, then Phil was already gone to Gansett Light in Lola. Leaving him stranded until Phil deigned to return. Not so long ago that would have daunted Clint. But the night was mild, the breeze in just the right quarter. _If I took the skiff, I wouldn't even have to row._

He sighted again, felt the wind pick up behind him, rustling the tall grass around the stumps. Remembered his own words that morning, walking through the cropgrass in those infernal waders that seemed more designed to retain than keep out water. _I promise to try not to go off and die on you_ seemed a hell of a lot more hollow now than it had standing on the shore watching Phil ruffle his dog, look up at him as if he’d seen straight through Clint to the electric sparks that shot between his neurons, seen the very center of him. 

_Somebody had to be out there, doing what he did._

There was no place here for half-hearted measures. 

_Hawkeye’d make that shot._

Clint sighted, once more. Held his breath. Nocked. Drew. Aimed. Let fly.

 

 

**Four**

 

Tom had been kind of clucking at Phil all evening, like a huge, pasty hen-- or maybe Skye was spending too much time with the North Bar chicken flock again. At any rate, Phil'd spent half his night at the bar, looking over his shoulder, even though Skye knew for damn sure he'd come to the island alone. She'd asked.

So she might not actually be doing much better than Tom, given that she found herself hovering whenever she was at a nearby table for any reason, just to do a quick Phil-check. Just for a nod or a smile, or to let him know Wanda Jackson wanted to know why the hell he was so gloomy tonight. (Wanda Jackson had some theories, actually, but Skye didn't figure Phil wanted to hear the phrase "lover's quarrel" right now.) Table 6 and Table 7 had never had it so good, with water filled and drinks refreshed and ketchup brought and food checked up on and checks brought nearly before anyone could raise a hand. Table 6 didn't seem to appreciate it, but their lack of generosity was more than made up by the gratuitously large nature of Table 7's, er, gratuity. 

Skye was still watching Phil. And the door. And Phil.

And the door.

And yet she missed the moment it happened. Instead, she came face-to-top-of-the-head with the new customer in Booth 2, recognized him, and slapped her pad down on the table and her butt in the squeaky vinyl seat.

Then she put her elbows on the tabletop, her chin on her elbows, and reached out and poked Clint on the crown of his head, all that was visible above the tops of his arms.

"I told him you were coming," she said. "He reminded me he'd taken the boat with the motor, and I told him it didn't matter." Clint's shoulders quaked and he finally looked up, dragging his fingers through hair, eyebrows, jowls, beard, before he was all the way straight in the booth.

"Yeah well. I'm great with boats. He seen me yet?" She looked up over his head, to find Phil staring back at them with a look on his face that was _damned_ sure going to get Wanda Jackson started over at Table 10, trying to calculate degrees of consanguinity and remember just _whose_ grandpa was related how, in the supposed Coulson-Barney family tree. 

"Yeah, he's seen you." She mimed pouring a beer to Tom, then pointed at Clint's head, then at Phil. Tom, who was at the far end of the bar when she started the motion, had suddenly rematerialized next to the taps by the end of it. "He's getting you a beer." 

"I'm gonna need one. Thank you, Skye." Clint sighed heavily and attempted to scrub his face into some semblance of normality. 

"What made you decide?" she asked, because she had absolutely zero time to be subtle. Clint's faced twisted, and there went any hope of him looking like he hadn't been broken apart and put back together with string anytime soon. 

"I really suck at staying behind and being helpless," he told her. "I end up pissing everybody off and doing stupid things. Way I figure, I'm made for the front lines. At least, I'm usually rushing in so fast it doesn't matter, I'm there by default. I just... I guess I realized he probably sucks at it too. You," he said over Skye's head, and she realized Phil must have come up while they were talking, "are still a high-handed, secretive SOB." Skye slipped out of the booth as he spoke. Phil placed two pints on the table and slid into her spot.

"I am," he agreed, and his _voice_ was light, sure, but his eyes were so heavy Skye felt like she'd intruded, just by seeing him.

"Just so we're clear on the subject," Clint said, and took a sip of the beer. "Hey, Skye, what's good tonight?"

"Um, oilpan?" she said at random, because she was completely surprised that he remembered she was still there, what with the way he was trying to pin Phil to the booth using just his gaze. 

"Ugh, no. Been too raw already today. Gimme a minute to think. You eaten yet?" he asked Phil.

"I half thought you'd be on the mainland by now," Phil said to him, twisting his pint glass around with the tips of his fingers, and Clint huffed at him.

“Tempting, but never a real option.”

“In spite of me going behind your back?”

"Yeah. You may be a high-handed asshole, and you really fucking muffed the sell there, but it'd be a shame to blow the opportunity in favor of something even more impulsively stupid, huh? Contrary to what my COs always told me, I _can_ weigh risks, and that one is heavy on the insane side."

"Ah." Phil said, straightening. "Just to be clear, this is you still angry, but willing to set that aside?" _I can work with that_ said his tone of voice. Clint rolled his eyes.

"You'll know when I'm still angry with you, trust me. No, this is me admitting you're right, so can we just fucking move on? I hate doing that." 

"No," Phil replied, eyes narrowing. "Why aren't you angry at me?"

"Why aren't I-- Phil? The hell? Can't you ever just take a gift horse?" It was clearly Clint's turn to be baffled. Skye looked from one to the other of them, and wondered if there was any possible way she could shut Wanda Jackson up now, the way they somehow drifted nearly close enough to touch foreheads. Eh. If half the town was speculating on whether Frank Barney and Phil were secret lovers, or just unnaturally handsy cousins, it beat what else they could be thinking about Frank Barney.

"I'm very bad at that, actually. Why?"

"Hell, Phil, I've been a spy most of my life, I am surrounded by high-handed secretive bastards. Practically the job description. I think it _was_ the job description for Blake. I don't want to.... Look...." Clint dropped his head and sighed, and Skye nearly whapped him upside the head with her pad. _Just fucking kiss already, jeez, you two._ "You've had things on pretty much your own terms the last fifteen years, I figured I'd cut you some slack. Just _read me in_ first next time, damnit, and deal with the fallout, okay? I promise to try not to be an idiot about it. But this won’t work if we’re not partners."

Oh. _That_ was what "gobsmacked" looked like. Skye wondered if it looked that funny on everyone else, or just Phil.

"Okay," Phil said, when he finally closed his mouth.

"Okay," Clint repeated, nodding at him, and then turned to Skye. "Crabcakes, clam fries, another round, and a pen. We're gonna be here awhile." 

"Check, check, check, and here," she said, fishing a spare ballpoint from the pocket of her apron. "And I'll try and keep the crowd off you, unless you really _want_ to deal with Wanda tonight."

"Not really, thanks, but," Phil told her, and then jerked his head behind her. She turned to find America slowly swabbing down Table 9 and glaring straight at Clint's back. _What the?_

"Yeah, I'll check that out," she told Phil. Though, on reflection, she probably knew what it was. _Don't worry, no-one's sniffing around your girl,_ she thought at America. _That's all your mess._ "Huh, what's that?"

Clint had been drawing an assortment of boxes and narrow lines on a napkin, with little initials in a chicken-scratch hand. He looked up at her question, and pointed the pen-end straight at Phil.

"If you're going in, you're going in right," he said, "and your knowledge of SHIELD is apparently out of date enough to be not relevant, cozy relationship with the Cavalry aside. So, listen up, bucko. This," he pointed at a hashmark, "is the front door. It looks open, but that's really to give good sightlines from above, if you get my drift. It's a canyon, and it all funnels through here...."

Skye left them to it. She had an actual _paying_ job to do, and just as she expected, Wanda was beckoning her over. Anyway, she needed a moment to compose herself just a little. Because somewhere in there, it had occurred to her that Clint had been describing her, too: used to answering to her own self first. Hating to be left behind or helpless. And she was about to be drifting right in that boat with him.

 

**Five**

The next two days passed by turns at a snail’s pace, and fast enough to carry away the reel. Phil felt like he was sailing into shoal waters faster than he could get a read on the bottom, and Clint really wasn’t helping matters. If he'd had any idea quite how thorough Clint intended to be, briefing him on SHIELD's New York Headquarters, he'd have asked Melinda for more time. Clint's font of knowledge was endless, arcane, sometimes profane. And if everything went according to plan, three-quarters of it would be useless.

"When the hell have you ever known a plan to go _according_ to plan?" Clint had asked him, and Phil had shrugged, and gotten back to studying the scribbled map showing the access points to various large pieces of ductwork. There was nothing he could say to that; if the Rangers hadn't burned that lesson into his skin, fifteen years of the vagaries of North Bar's weather, researchers, and the Preservation Society would have. 

So Clint followed Phil around on his chores, talking SHIELD a mile a minute, and Phil tried to pay attention. He paid attention while pulling his best suit-- the blue with the subtle pinstripe-- out of the cedar closet and steaming it until every seam was straight, the lapel crisp, the cuffs sharp. Clint lectured him on the security grid while Phil hunched over his desk double-checking his reference sheet, weighing the risks of calling the people on it just in case. They both spent time on his resume, Clint pulling relevant keywords out of-- so far as Phil could tell-- his finely-formed ass. 

The wealth of detail on SHIELD's operations and logistics Clint laid at his feet made Phil sorry he'd ever teased him on the matter. It also forcibly reminded him that Clint had already not once, but twice, planned and carried out assaults on SHIELD installations. _Thank god everyone thinks he's dead, or they'd never leave him in peace. Or did they actually buy into his whole_ what, me worry? _schtick, until too late?_

Clearly, Phil was the world's biggest nerd-- he'd been told so several times (by Holly, along with people who hadn't slept with him and therefore didn't count)-- because the fact that Clint expressed concern through _excessive preparation_ was even more attractive than his biceps. And those were some truly spectacular biceps. It was hard not to feel a little like nougat inside when Clint got started on dog watch rotations.

However attractive it was, though, it was also _tiring_. Every single moment that wasn't given to the island was given to Clint, to SHIELD-- more even, Phil thought, than when Frank Barney had first been lying on his couch feverish and unconscious. _If only I'd known then that's the quietest he gets_. 

The day before the interview, Phil reached his limit. His head was buzzing with SHIELD, his stomach was knotted with Clint, and he needed time to sort it out in the quiet. He sent Clint off with Lucky on a cross-island ramble and stood in the middle of his den, looking over the neat folders, his suit in its bag, his shoes shined and set neatly on the rag rug, and running his hands through his hair in frustration. _I'm missing something. I_ know _I am._

First step, he decided, was to run down his checklist. 

\----

“Holy shit, Phil, when’s the last time you were even in here?” 

Phil looked up from the box he’d been nose-deep in, to find Clint disentangling a large cobweb from his beard. He’d come up behind Phil so quietly he hadn’t even realized he was no longer alone in the room until Clint spoke. It had been crowded in the disused side porch, which was mostly filled with boxes, even before Clint added his presence. Now, it was nearly claustrophobic. Boarded-up windows, covered in nondescript vines, filtered the light. Between that and the cobwebs, Clint looked out of focus and dusty.

“Not that long ago, actually-- there was this superhero who washed up on my beach and ended up needing the spare room. I had to clean the boxes out.” 

“Well you clearly didn’t bother to dust,” Clint muttered, and eyed the dark beams that braced the roof warily.

“You’re back earlier than I thought,” Phil hedged, hoping Clint would take the hint. 

“Lucky wanted to say hi to some dead fish. He didn’t appreciate being removed from the situation. I told him if he was gonna sulk, we were gonna turn around and come home. So,” Clint shrugged, “we came home.”

Of course. He couldn’t expect Lucky to actually be helpful and keep distractions away for once. Especially not broad-shouldered distractions that were crowded in way too close to him, in between the haphazard stacks of boxes. Distractions that were looming in such a way that his eye was essentially at crotch level….

“What did I come in here for?” Phil asked said crotch, and frowned in what he hoped was an off-putting manner. The crotch backed off, and Clint squatted down next to him.

It wasn’t much of an improvement.

“Dunno. You’ve been nervy all day,” he said, and made an abortive movement at Phil’s shoulder. Phil shrugged it off.

“Yeah, wonder why,” he said, and kept digging. “Social security card. That’s what I needed. Should be in this box or the next.” He waved at a small filing case nearly identical to the one he was rifling through, and Clint obligingly pulled it forward and flipped it open.

“Look,” Clint said into the file case, flipping through the neatly-labelled manila folders as if his life depended on it. _Which it might_ , Phil thought.

He stopped rifling through his set of files and gulped against the sudden lump in his throat. 

Clint, unfortunately, noticed, like Clint always noticed. 

“It’s okay,” he said quietly, his own fingers stilled between two sets of files, “it really is. You don’t have to do this. There's no pride wrapped up in it. We’ll find another way. If you want to call May and cancel, I'll back your play, alright?” 

The end of his question came out fierce but unsupported, and Phil clamped his hands down on the side of the file box to keep from grabbing Clint’s face between his hands.

“Not all right. Clint, we don’t have a lot of choice. We need data from SHIELD, and Skye needs an inside man to access it. All I really have to do is _be_ there. Not so tough.”

Clint frowned at him, his glower growing darker.

“If you think that, Phil, you’re really _not_ going in there. I don't care who you worked with in the field a half-lifetime ago, this isn't the organization you knew. Don’t mistake SHIELD, even wounded, for an easy mark. Not Fury’s organization, never. HYDRA made that mistake, and he cheerfully cut off his own arm-- well, metaphorical arm-- to burn them out of SHIELD. This isn’t entry-level spy stuff.”

“I _know_ that, Clint,” Phil snapped back at him, because good lord why else was he trying to hide in here among his boxes? “And I may be rusty… very rusty… but this isn’t _exactly_ my first rodeo.” 

It wasn’t precisely a lie. It was just that the last time he’d had to infiltrate anything worse than a gathering of drunk summerers, it wasn’t in a pinstripe suit. Kevlar made a huge difference to a man’s pride. 

“I just--” Clint shrugged and turned back to the files, concentrating on them as if they held all the secrets SHIELD and HYDRA and the CIA had left to hide. “I still don’t get why you’d do this.”

“Do what?” Phil’s voice was far shorter than he’d intended it to be, and he sighed in what he hoped would be taken as apology.

“Put yourself in danger for me,” Clint said, not meeting his eyes. “You’re not part of this at all. Let’s face it, this isn’t in the same universe as patching me up and keeping me alive. You don’t have to prove you’re tough or anything-- and you don’t owe me anything--”

And Phil had to cut him off right there, or else he was going to shake him. Part of him was wailing _why couldn’t you have had this revelation_ before _I decided I was going to walk empty-handed into the belly of SHIELD?_ but the rest of him was growing slowly, lastingly, livid at somebody. Several somebodies, perhaps. Many of them somebodies with superpowers, who nevertheless apparently couldn’t understand the one basic fact Phil had comprehended quite quickly:

“I don’t _have_ to owe you anything, Clint, I _want_ to do this. Frankly, I can’t imagine who wouldn’t be willing to do this for you.” Especially if Clint looked at them the way Clint was looking up at him through the gloom, all wide lost eyes and parted lips. He shook his head, and that only made his resemblance to Lucky worse. (Except that Lucky was a dog and Clint was a man, distractingly so just at the moment.)

“For Hawkeye,” Clint said, and Phil was confused for a long, slow moment. 

“No,” he whispered, when he finally understood. “For Clint Barton.” It was far too much, but he gave it up willingly, and the words felt sacramental on his lips.

Clint stared at him, mouth open and working and no sound coming out. (Well, perhaps a squeak or two, just on the edge of hearing.) Phil waited for a moment to see if the squeaks would resolve into words. When nothing coherent emerged, he turned back to his files and flipped through them, unseeing.

“Phil…” Clint tried at last, and Phil shrugged it off. He wasn’t sure, really, that he wanted to hear whatever Clint was going to say, good or bad. He kind of preferred to just let the declaration hang out there, for what it was, not demanding or expecting a reply.

After a moment, Clint swore, and Phil huffed in an amused breath. _Yeah, that._

Then Clint slid something out of the file, something that rattled a little, and held it up. Phil glanced over. An old set of dog tags dangled from his long fingers, their black paint chipping and the little rubber silencers frayed.

“‘Corporal Hollis.’ The boyfriend’s?” he asked, quietly. Phil looked from them, up to Clint’s face. He was carefully not looking at Phil, or at much of anything. For a moment, Phil felt a chill cross the back of his neck, like Holly hovering over his shoulder. _I laid you to rest when I came to North Bar_ he thought, crossly. “They’re both here.”

He held out his hand, and after a moment Clint passed over the tags. Phil concentrated on them, remembering how they’d felt on Holly’s chest, caught in the wiry hairs there. The darkly amused grin on Holly’s saturnine face when he caught Phil watching them slap against his chest, irony hiding arousal. Another detail flashed against his eyelids: the tan line from his helmet hitting just at the bottom of that absurd widow’s peak of his, that Phil had loved to rub his lips against. It had been so long since Phil’d remembered his face that clearly.

“They’re not… he wasn’t wearing them when he died. He gave them to me to wear when we left the service. I’d asked. I wanted to do the kinds of things couples did when they didn’t have to hide.”

“That why you left?” Clint hadn’t moved, and he was watching Phil’s hands instead of Phil’s face. There was nothing Phil wanted more than to shut him up, by any means necessary. Holly had no goddamn bearing on them infiltrating SHIELD. He should get to keep a few secrets, laid to rest in the North Bar sand. Retain a little bit of dignity in Clint’s eyes, too, maybe. The last of the veneer of the hermit with the tragic lost love. _Partners_ , he reminded himself. _You damn well owe him this much._

“We didn’t choose to leave; DADT chose for us,” Phil said at last. “We got honorable discharges mostly because the superior officer who discovered us did so at a bar where he’d brought a spouse who wasn’t his. We stayed around New York for a while, trying to build a life. Doing shit like that,” he waved at the dog tags. “It _was_ boring, but I needed that, or I thought I did. Wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to go in. I… stagnated. And then Holly got bored of suits and a job in insurance, and joined up with Archstone. Went overseas to do private security, as they called it.”

“When did he die?” Clint asked, his voice neutral, like he was trying to coax one of the chickens out of the henhouse. “Phil?” 

“1999,” Phil said. “Somewhere in the mountains. In Yugoslavia. A hostile from our old ops, from Orlat, recognized him. It took Archstone a while to find out what happened to him. We got a letter eventually. They thought they knew which his bones were, in the grave, so they could send them back. I never did… they were still testing, when I went away to North Bar.” No one had seemed that concerned; not Archstone, not the third cousin. Only Phil, and Phil had no legal rights-- not even moral rights, not the way they’d parted in such polite silence when Holly’d gotten on the plane that last time. Still, he’d wanted to bring Holly back to New York.

His eyes were blurring, it was the dust, they’d stirred up far too much of it, must have been lying there for so long to be so much dust. He needed to clean better. 

“I’m sorry,” Clint said, and curled his hand over Phil’s knee. “Phil… I’m sorry. No wonder you came here.”

Phil snorted. _We could leave it at that, I suppose._

“I was already planning to,” he said instead. “When Holly left he… he didn’t say so, but I was pretty sure he was leaving me. He didn’t feel right asking me to join Archstone with him, you see. He was disappointed. In me. Didn’t think I could hack it there. Wondered if I was ever going to,” the dust was blinding now, and the boxes were looming, and it was all just too damn much. “Live up to my _promise_. I’m sorry, Clint. I can’t… I need air.”

He barely saw Clint as he stumbled past, out the door and through the den. He needed sunshine, he needed the breeze… he needed to dig his way out of the past, get Holly to stop hovering, stop whispering in his ear that Phil wasn’t prepared, he was just going to get them killed, Clint had been right, they’d all been right….

The sunlight blinded him as he came through the door, the ocean greeted him from beyond the dunes with a muted smash, and Phil closed his eyes and shuddered.

\----

Clint let Phil leave, and heard him settle on the porch, before he got up to do the normal afternoon chores. _Least I can do after fucking things up that way_. At least the daily round of North Bar life was as habitual to him now as the rhythm of the day had ever been in a SHIELD base or Avengers Tower. More, perhaps, since there was only Phil-- and Lucky, and the chickens, and Skye, and maybe Kate-- to rub up against and disturb matters.

Chicken feed ran through his fingers, and he dusted them off on his pants before closing the gate to the yard. _Really good timing, Barton, screwing it up now._ The intention had been good, when Clint had settled in next to Phil in the box-walled cave. Try and settle his own nerves and Phil’s so they could get on with the rest of the agenda, before time ran out for them entirely and Phil disappeared off to New York. Instead, he’d let his own nerves stir up Phil’s, then he’d dug up something clearly better left buried.

His feet were already on the path up and around the mansion to do Phil’s standard daily glance-over “just to make sure the damn thing is still standing.” 

_But he_ let me _dig it up_. That… that had to mean something.

The mansion was quiet and still, all windows neatly repaired, and the shingles in decent shape despite Skye’s best attempts to affix them at odd angles. As a roofer, she made a great computer hacker. Clint diligently looked for cracks, but his feet were set in a different direction.

Down beyond the mansion, the stumps he’d set up for Kate still stood. The light was starting to drain out, not twilight yet but starting to think about it. The lawn, the rosehips nestled in their thorny bunches, were losing color. 

Clint walked right up to the stump and examined it a little, smiling ruefully, before reaching out a hand to brush the shafts of the two arrows still stuck in it, one inside the split remains of the other.

_No half-hearted measures now._

\----

“Phil?” 

His name was barely a puff of air as Clint said it. Phil turned, despite himself, to find Clint just behind him up against the back of the swing. One of those tan, capable hands of his was hovering just above Phil’s shoulder, as if it couldn’t decide whether to settle or brush. The look on Clint’s face was similarly unsettled, drawn-in on itself. Phil smiled up at him, careful not to startle. 

The hand descended and squeezed once, knuckles stroking the back of his neck. The gesture was so like Phil’s, on the playground-- was it only a few days ago?-- that it startled him into a smile. Clint moved out from behind him and came to settle on the swing, jogging Phil’s shoulder with his own briefly as he did. He set it moving and poked out with his foot to keep it going, a gentle creak back and forth that very nearly matched the waves that tumbled up the beach and sprayed the dune grass, just visible at the end of the break that led to the dock. 

After a while Clint took the dog tags from Phil’s limp grasp, looked at them, then carefully set them aside on the rail of the porch. He stopped the swing as he did.

“It’s probably kind of stupid to try telling you not to let it get to you, right?” he asked, and Phil snorted.

“That I’m so… uninspiring… that my ex-lover went off to a war zone to get away from me? That the man who knew me best and longest thought I’d be useless for work at a half-assed organization like Archstone, much less this? You’re right, Clint, this isn’t entry-level spy stuff, and I’m going to go do it anyway. So, no it’s not getting to me at all.”

“Yeah, okay, but it was worth a try, right?” 

Phil turned to glare at him, and caught his breath instead. Clint’s arms were on his knees, powerful back bowed, and he was glancing up at Phil with a sheepish grin. Something about the easy deference laid him by the lee. It was either laugh or sob, and that wasn’t much of a choice.

“Asshole,” he muttered through the chuckle, and was rewarded with a bump, Clint’s shoulder against his.

“I won’t blow smoke up your ass, Phil. I’m just as nervous as you are, which I think should be fucking obvious by now, given the way I’ve been pecking at you. But one thing I’m _not_ is worried about you letting me down. Ever. Or half-assing your way through anything. And I’m sorry the guy’s dead, but if that’s how he felt, I’m so fucking glad he left. You could do better.”

“Oh yes,” Phil replied, staring determinedly out to sea, because he was less likely to drown in it than in Clint’s gaze at the moment. “I’ve done so well.”

Clint shrugged. 

“Could do worse, too, if you wanted.” 

Phil shot a glance at him, but Clint was looking at his hands, then at the sea himself, and that was probably for the best.

“Anyway,” Clint continued after a long pause, “I think you’d have been wasted at Archstone. You would have made a badass super-spy. And I do _not_ say that about all the boys.” 

Phil ducked his head and laughed.

“Yeah, well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, especially as I’m about to go pretend I want to be one, but I can’t figure out where you got that impression, Clint.”

“Are you _kidding_ me?” Clint’s exclamation sounded like it was practically ripped out of his throat, and he whipped his head up to stare at Phil. “Are you fucking _kidding_ me with that, Coulson? Do you even… don’t you… how can you… with the rescue, and the bandaging, and the dog, and the _planned infiltration of SHIELD_? How can you even wonder?”

“‘Planned infiltration’ only so far. Definitely not ‘successful infiltration’ yet. And only for an informational interview. They don’t write Furst novels about that stuff.”

“Well. They _will_ after this.”

“Clint!” Phil said, and then stopped, because the look Clint was pinning him with, intent as a raptor, made it hard to breathe. Clint went unfocused after a moment, and something crossed his face-- it might have been a quiet laugh. At himself, Phil thought.

“Look, don’t… don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” Clint asked, scootching closer. Phil opened his mouth to say something, but couldn’t get it out.

His mouth was suddenly occupied with Clint’s lips and tongue. 

The man could move like a darter; before Phil'd had time to register his intent, Clint had cupped his face with those knobby hands and was kissing him. His thumbs stroked the line of Phil's jaw and burrowed into his beard, and Phil realized his entire body had arched forward into the touch.

Even if he _hadn’t_ been starved for caresses, after so many years with so few, Phil still wouldn’t have been able to help himself. He’d been imagining the planes of that back under his hands ever since he’d slung Clint over his shoulders to carry him home, and there was no power on earth that could keep him from grabbing them now. (And oh god, how perfect, the way the muscles slid under the thin jersey of Clint’s tee.) He’d wanted the scratch of that young beard against his cheek, his lips, ever since it had started to appear, and the reality made him weak at the knees.

In his defense, no one in their right mind could have been expected to resist the combined efforts of Clint’s hands, tongue, and entire body, all focused on one thing.

Phil was going to break apart, just dissolve into sand on the beach, if it went on much longer. He whined softly around Clint’s tongue, and Clint pulled back just a little, a secret (and slightly dazed) smile on his face. His lips were swollen, his skin flushed and red where he’d nuzzled into Phil’s beard.

Phil blinked twice as the lips left his, and the world started to resolve itself around him; the smell of the ocean and sand, the glow of the evening light and the man in front of him.

“What way am I _supposed_ to take that?” he asked.

\----  


To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on Washed Ashore: The right way to take it, further revelations, and Phil Goes to SHIELD.
> 
> Your [tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/95686584811/washed-ashore-chapter-9-sudden-shoaling-kathar%22) this time is Tony the hen.
> 
> Well, you guys, I hope you’re excited for next week! Up until Thursday, this chapter didn’t end this way, and there was another chapter between this one and what happens next time. You owe [faeleverte](http://archiveofourown.org/users/faeleverte/pseuds/faeleverte) big for holding my hand through the plot surgery that happened on Thursday night, and the frantic editing since.


	10. Sea Change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The right way to take it, further revelations, and Phil Goes to SHIELD.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the rating change to E.
> 
> For those of you who fade to black when the action hits the bedroom, skip Scene Two.
> 
> Obligatory chicken note: If you’re worried about the chickens in this chapter, I’m doing it wrong.

**One**

“What way am I _supposed_ to take that?” Phil asked.

The sun was setting behind the mainland, and dark was beginning-- just beginning-- to creep into the edges of the shadows, to dim the sky where it met the ocean. Clint couldn’t think for a moment, too caught up in the tide pools of Phil’s eyes, his senses still foamy from their kiss.

It took him a long moment to realize that the pools were troubled and to fully register Phil’s words. Clint gave him the most reassuring smile he could muster, which probably dribbled over a bit into daft, and deliberately ran his thumbs through the addictive bristle on Phil’s chin.

“Whatever way you like best, I guess,” he tried, and stroked his fingers up across Phil’s temple and into his hair, trying to gentle the growing unease out of him. Under his thumbs, Phil’s hair was fine and sleek as a goose-feather fletching, and he had to bite his lip against the tickle. His finger pads were already sensitive after shooting without a tab, then scoured by Phil’s beard. 

Or maybe it was just that, having started touching Phil, his hands were incapable of stopping. Clint put all his effort into letting his fingers, always more eloquent than his mouth, soothe Phil.

For once, his hands failed or the caresses didn’t reassure. Phil pulled away a little more, one hand moving to Clint’s chest to hold him back-- though he stayed in the embrace, thank god.

“That’s not really an answer, Clint,” he said. “What did you mean? What’s the wrong way to take this?” His hand curled a little into Clint’s t-shirt, as if he were trying to tug the words out of Clint’s heart. 

_If only._

Words failed Clint at the best of times. It was all _there_ in him, in all its spine-tingling, frustrating, astounding mess, and somehow none of it would fit through the funnel of speech. Sometimes, it didn’t even fit into concepts his own _mind_ could recognize. And now, his entire body was in on the conspiracy against coherence.

Phil wasn’t helping in the least. It would have been so much easier to find the appropriate words-- if there _were_ appropriate words to explain away what had been kind of a nonsense phrase muttered largely out of nerves-- if Phil’s gaze wasn’t locked so fiercely on his, wasn’t so _searching_.

 _Phil_ needed words, it seemed.

Clint bit his lip.

“I just…” he started, “I just know what it might look like, the timing, I mean.”

“What timing?”

“You… here, with those tags, and clearly kinda-- well, with me digging up all that-- making you remember,” he sighed and gave up on that sentence. “With you not feeling your normal badass self. And me, being all… well, it might look,” he slumped in frustration, wanting to give up and use his hands but unwilling to let Phil go. “I just wanted to make sure you know it’s not, like, a pity-fuck or anything.”

Phil drew back further now, and Clint bit back the urge to babble _no, no wrong direction, please come back here_ or to clutch at his elbows as he went.

“Why would you think I’d think that?” Phil asked, face as raw as an oyster on the half-shell. Fuck. Clint laughed, or approximated it, around the knot in his throat. The result was an airless, humorless little chuckle.

“Didn’t you?” he asked.

“No, of course not. I--” Phil paused for a moment, and Clint fought a cringe. “Well. I am now!”

“Damnit, I told you not to do that!” _Great, mouth, this is what happens when I let you loose._

“I wouldn’t have thought it if you hadn’t mentioned it!” 

Clint raised a single eyebrow in reply, because he knew he was bad with his words, but he _did_ know Phil by now.

Phil blushed, gave a little airless laugh of his own and buried his face in his hands.

“Okay, maybe I would have gotten around to it when you stopped kissing me,” he admitted. Fondness seeped in at Clint’s toes and spread, till it threatened to leak out at his eyes. 

“Ah, well, I can fix that mistake,” he said, and laid fingers on Phil’s wrists in a stroke as light as the beach grass against his toes as he walked the dunes. 

Phil didn’t look up, but his shoulders slumped a little in relief.

“And the right way to take it?” he asked, voice muffled in his palms.

Clint kissed his forehead, while he tried to think up the answer to _that_ one, because if he’d known how to explain himself in the first place, he wouldn’t have resorted to just kissing the guy like a fool. Finally he resorted to breaking it down to its simplest components:

“I really wanted to kiss you? And have since the first time I saw you? And I kinda thought you felt the same way?”

“I _do_ ,” Phil’s voice was plaintive from behind his hands. Clint fought down the urge to gather the man into his arms, because it was the absurdest damn thing to hear from a capable, strong, grown-ass and very decidedly masculine man. Any chance there’d ever been that he could have been content with _not_ kissing Phil was vanishing rapidly, and this kind of behavior was just making it worse. “But why _now?_ ” 

He propped his chin on his hands and stared up at Clint, eyes lost. Clint started laughing outright, he couldn’t help it. He pulled Phil’s wrists down to his lap and leaned in, nuzzling his nose against the wiry scruff on Phil’s cheek he’d wanted to burrow into for so long.

“Because,” he murmured into the shell of Phil’s ear, “you’re going to SHIELD tomorrow.”

“And you wanted to make sure you got to kiss me before I very possibly go to the Fridge?” He sounded considerably more himself, amusement starting to curl the edges of his words, and it gave Clint courage to continue.

“That, I guess, a bit. But more because I wanted to kiss you before you lost this goddamned beard of yours. It drives me crazy.”

The sensation of Phil giving way to laughter was like a mini earthquake against him, shaking him loose of all conscious control. He gathered Phil back to him and laid his lips on Phil’s, or tried to; Phil met Clint halfway, chuckling against his mouth, bumping his nose and pulling back twice with the aftershocks of laughter before settling in.

The kiss tasted like salt and seaweed and butter. It scoured him, just like the first one had. Phil pressed in, all soft and sure, and his tongue darted its way across Clint’s lips. One of the two of them groaned, Clint wasn’t sure which, he was too busy opening to Phil just as Phil did the same for him.

The evening stopped for a little, drawn out into one long slow moment where the freshening breeze chilled Clint’s back while Phil heated his chest, his mouth and other parts southward that were beginning to make their presence felt in emphatic ways.

This time when Phil pulled away, it was to ask:

“I’m sorry, did you say ‘pity-fuck’?” 

Clint opened his mouth, closed it, and blinked at Phil, who was managing to look remarkably blank for someone whose lips were that wet and swollen. _Oh, please, not more talking._

“Yes, but I didn’t mean. It wasn’t--” 

“Pity. I get it. But you’re still planning on the ‘fuck,’ part, are you?”

It was Clint’s turn to blush, lobster-red, he was sure, and Phil’s turn to raise an eyebrow. 

“I… um… _hoping_ more than planning. Offering. Does ‘offering’ work?” 

“The beard thing again?” Phil asked. He was teasing. He _had_ to be. Anything else was unthinkable-- largely because Clint’s thoughts had all gone to seed, scattered on the wind, leaving him here all exposed and blown. _And this is only from kissing._

Clint gave up even trying to form words, and just leaned in for what he hoped was a very _demonstrative_ kiss, with a hand that trailed very decisively down Phil’s back to cup his ass and thigh through the thick denim. _Beards are nice_ the hand said, he hoped, _but there’s a hell of a lot else to explore and not a lot of time to do it in_. When he pulled back at last, he pursed his lips and waited.

“Well,” Phil said, after a judicious pause in which he looked Clint up and down, and Clint tried to remember to breathe, “you make a good argument. I suppose we could work something out.” His smile turned devious at the edges. “Since it _is_ potentially my last night as a free man.”

He stood up and grabbed Clint’s hands as they fell. Clint let himself be pulled upright and into the cottage.

**Two**

It was only the second or third time Clint had been in Phil’s bedroom under the eaves. His vague impression had been that it was cozy yet spare and a little creaky, as if it half belonged on a schooner instead of in a cottage. 

As they came in, Clint stopped for a moment to get his bearings. The curtains were open in the little round window, letting the red light of sunset burnish Phil, setting sparks in his eyes, ruddying his beard and his shirt and his already flushed cheeks. (Red light at night, sailor’s delight.) 

They were still holding hands, and Phil’s glance towards the bed made Clint look down at it, too, the neat tree of life on the quilt glowing as richly as Phil himself in the light and the shadows creeping around the edges, like the rest of the world had faded into indistinctness. 

Eventually, Clint remembered to breathe. He stepped forward to bring both hands up Phil’s arms, cupping his face again, revelling in that beard before it disappeared, and looking for a final yes.

“Yes,” Phil said, smiling back at him. His voice was a little dazed maybe, but steady, and he tucked a lock of Clint’s hair back out of the way and took a deep breath. “Oh, yes.” It came out as a sigh, and it filled Clint’s lungs and his veins with fire.

“Good,” Clint said, and threw Phil down on the bed, landing heavily on top of him and driving the air from them both.

Phil was laughing in between sighs and more muttered little “yes”es, as Clint nipped at every inch of neck and ear he could find. His shirt was fine and worn in, soothing to Clint’s still-sensitive fingers, and the way Phil’s chest hair slid beneath it brought a wholly unexpected level of anticipation, but it was definitely time and past time it came off.

Clint dealt with the problem with all the dispatch he’d learned in a long, misspent life, and Phil gasped as his head disappeared into the cotton flannel as Clint yanked upwards. When he reappeared on the other end, it was with a stunned expression. 

Not half as stunned as Clint’s, though. Because the Phil that was bared under his hands and his gaze was just unbelievable.

“What the fuck,” he found himself saying, “I take it back. You’re not a spy, you’re motherfucking Grizzly Adams under there.”

“Wow. As dirty talk goes, Clint, I guarantee you that was unique,” Phil told him, and Clint glanced up to find his eyes filled with both laughter and a little confusion. Clint shook his head, unable to speak for a moment, because, well because of _all that chest hair,_ because of those _muscles,_ not sculpted ones, nor the over-developed ones that were tool of Clint’s profession, just the kind of wiry, whip-strong body that clearly moved through the world with power and purpose. 

_What have I gotten myself into?_ Clint had half a moment to think, before realizing he really ought to say something. 

“Hey, you can’t tell me he wasn’t hot. But _you_ , you’re just… god, Phil, you’re…” he gave up trying to describe the precise mix of security and safety and flat-out knocked-over lust that the sight of Phil was sending through his body. "Incredible. You’re… incredible.” 

“I’m… really not,” Phil tried, and Clint dove forward and kissed the breath out of him, burned through the disbelief on his tongue, let his fingers and his lips, and his hips and all the weight of him grinding down tell Phil just how wrong he was. 

Eventually, he heard Phil’s moans turn a bit discontented, and eased up about a half inch, curious. Phil really was meant for a spy, his protests aside, because his hands had apparently snuck under the hem of Clint’s t-shirt while Clint had been otherwise occupied. He didn’t realize what was going on until his shirt was half over his shoulders and Phil was yanking it the rest of the way over his head.

“Hah!” Phil muttered, triumph riding deep in his voice and eyes. Clint straightened his arms as he came back down, and Phil’s smirk turned abruptly into open-mouthed wonder.  
Clint tried not to preen, or at least feel a little like he’d gotten his own back, as Phil ate him up with his gaze. It wasn’t even like Phil hadn’t _seen_ it all before-- after all, Clint had been all but naked when he’d washed up on Phil’s beach.

_Though the angle’s new, I suppose._

“Like what you see?” he asked. It surprised him how honest the question came out. He knew perfectly well what he looked like, and there were any number of people ready to use labels like “cut” and “hot” and even, kind of absurdly, “godlike.” (Clint had seen Thor naked, okay? And Clint wasn’t in the habit of self-deception-- well, not at that level, anyway.) 

“You know I do,” Phil whispered, and drew a shaky hand down Clint’s ribs. “I did even when you were half-drowned. My God, you’re handsome.”

Clint’s laugh ended up slightly off, because that, oddly, was not an adjective that got used about him a lot. Gorgeous, beautiful, sexy, sure. _Handsome_ was so fucking Phil, it drove away the last of his worries, warmed him through to the core. (The core was pretty damn warm already, there.)

“I… I…” his throat caught again for a moment, “can’t believe you, Phil Coulson. You are fucking amazing.”

“ _I_ am?” It was unfair that Phil could manage an incredulous eyebrow under the circumstances, and Clint dipped down to kiss the look off his face.

“Fine, it’s mutual then,” he replied, dipping further to rub his forehead against Phil’s scritchy chin while beginning to nip under his neck. “Are you going to just lie there, or are you going to take my jeans off?”

“Jeans,” Phil said firmly, and suited his actions to his words, unbuttoning and pushing them down off Clint's hips, those calloused hands raising goosebumps along his pelvis as they brushed. 

“Um,” Phil said, when he had bared Clint’s backside, and “Um,” again a moment later. Clint smirked down at him.

“Yes?”

“You know, um, you could have told me you didn’t like boxers. You didn’t _have_ to go commando.” But his hands were telling a different story, already stroking over Clint’s bare ass, down the backs of his thighs, nails scraping on the upstroke.

“I _do_ like boxers, though,” Clint replied, and wriggled out of Phil’s grip, laughing at the little moue of disappointment Phil let slip as he did. He kissed his way down Phil’s gloriously furry chest, taking the time to lick a circle around his navel, then bit down on Phil’s belt and began to pull. “I like them on _you_ for instance,” he continued when he’d gotten the tongue free.

Phil froze, and Clint grinned to himself and used his teeth to complete the maneuver. (Never mind where he’d learned that trick or how often he’d had to practice to get it right-- all the hypothetical failures in the world were redeemed in that one success.) He repeated the trick with the fly, enjoying the feeling of tearing into Phil, burrowing through the layers until he came to naked belly, musky skin, tightly-curled hair.

“Yes,” Clint said, knowing his own voice was thick with satisfaction as he found the generous bulge beneath a thin layer of navy and white cotton. (And anchors; how… appropriate.) “Yes, I like them on you very _much_.” And then he nuzzled at the bulge, felt it kick and harden under his cheek. He wanted to stay like this for hours, face nestled firmly in the fabric of Phil’s open fly. But he didn’t think either of them were going to last hours.

Clint, too, could be devious. He distracted Phil with a nip to his navel, while he pulled Phil’s pants from the knees. He shucked them off like the husk from a corn, then dove back down to take the boxers in his teeth.

Phil was cursing above him, pawing at his hair now, grabbing occasionally, twisting and reaching, and Clint hummed encouragement at him. He tasted so damn good, of briney sweat, smelled of earth, sounded like….

“Shit,” Phil said above him, and Clint realized when he raised his head that half of Phil’s wriggling had been him attempting to reach the drawer in the little nightstand at the head of his bed.

“Shit?” Clint prompted after a moment.

“I don’t have any condoms,” Phil groaned.

“Fuck,” Clint agreed, and glared at the drawer as if it could pop them up like mushrooms if just urged to with enough sincerity. “Fuck.”

“And I don’t think either of us are in shape enough to take the boat into town right now,” Phil continued, and Clint couldn’t help it. He pillowed his head on the nearest surface-- the nearest very hard surface-- and laughed at the mental image that produced. 

Because he half believed Phil _would_ , if Clint asked him to.

\----

“Oh stop laughing,” Phil tried to grump, but it was a losing cause. Through the haze of arousal, he could feel the laughter bubbling up in him. 

“But that’s the best part,” Clint said, and he looked up at Phil with those damned eyes of his glinting and happy. For a moment Phil was lost, lust swamped by a wave of tenderness. As it receded it left a strange hollow feeling. Tonight was tonight because tomorrow, Phil would be going into SHIELD, and if their plan failed he’d never see this a second time. If it succeeded, well, Clint would be leaving his bed and his island, going back to the Tower where he belonged. _Pull yourself together, man-- even if it’s only tonight, you’ve got Hawkeye hovering inches above your dick._

“Fine, then, keep laughing, and I’ll handle this myself,” Phil managed, and reached down to suit his actions to his words.

Clint, as he’d hoped, batted him away and mock-growled at him.

“Mine, damnit,” he said, and very efficiently rid Phil of his boxers. 

And then… he just sat there on his haunches for a long moment, straddling Phil and staring down at him with the face of someone discovering chocolate for the first time. 

“Are you, um?” Phil asked, and wasn’t sure what he was asking. 

“Yep,” Clint replied. “Just… give me a moment of anticipation here.” His lips curved into a grin. Phil didn’t move, just a tiny bit uncertain, because the sheer weight of Clint’s arousal was overwhelming. It had been… never mind how long… since he’d had anyone in bed with him, and he didn’t think he’d _ever_ had someone stare at him in quite the way Clint had ever since he’d taken the man’s hand. Phil, hairy naked Phil collapsed on his back and splayed, hard-on at full mast, had his entire attention, as if he was calculating a plan of attack. He was pinned in place by that gaze.

Phil ought to ask how they wanted to do this, since the condoms took certain options off the table. Except that Clint caught his eye, gave him a grin that was equal parts delight and danger, then dove down and swallowed… fucking… god…

...swallowed Phil down in one fucking motion. Bucking up into his mouth was not really the politest thing Phil had ever done, but it was a damned imperative at that point. And anyway, Clint seemed to appreciate it, if the little satisfied hum as he pulled back was an indication.

“Yes,” he rasped, “this could work, all right,” and then those lips were back and brushing, followed by a tongue that wriggled and teased and then the hot warmth of Clint’s mouth, tongue still pressing in counterpoint as he bobbed up and down. Phil gave in to inevitability, curled his fingers in Clint’s hair, and laid back to let himself be washed out to sea. The coiling warmth low in his belly expanded, ebbed and flowed with each duck of Clint’s head. It spread to his knees as Clint’s fingers slid between his thighs and began to stroke, making them shake. 

Despite Clint’s evident care to make sure he crested a bit higher each time but never quite came over the edge, Phil knew it couldn’t last forever-- all the long days they’d been on the verge of this, sliding past each other, eyes catching, breath hitching, hands brushing, had left his control in tatters. All he could do was furl his sails and tack before the wind, hoping that there’d be enough left of him to float after he crashed.

“Clint, god,” he said when the surge had built up to unendurable levels within him, was threatening to burst him apart, “Clint, you _have_ to let me come, _please,_.” 

Clint’s only response was a little satisfied hum and chuckle, but given where his mouth _was_ that was _it_ , Phil went under, deep under, vision darkening and mouth opening in a desperate attempt to breathe. His hips convulsed well beyond his conscious control, and he was arching all the way off the bed, twisting as he came in long waves which Clint rode with steady hands under Phil’s ass.

It felt like ages before Phil collapsed, blinking his way back to coherence. The sweat cooling was nearly unendurable on his flushed skin, and his limbs tingled as blood rushed back into them. 

Small movements from the end of the bed made him move a foot, almost automatically, to catch at Clint’s arm and push.

“If you’re trying to get yourself off down there,” he warned Clint, “I am going to take it _very_ personally.”

Clint’s laughter was like shoals of fish, darting brightly around him. He slid back up next to Phil, the heat of his body settling something in Phil.

“Well, then, perhaps you should do something about it,” he whispered, breath warm and humid in Phil’s ear, and Phil turned his head to nip at the lips he’d been presented with.

As he did, he slipped a hand down the long warm expanse of Clint’s chest, trailing his nails until he hit Clint’s navel, where they dipped for a moment. It startled a growl out of Clint, which Phil swallowed greedily. He reached lower.

Circling a hand around Clint brought on a brief flash of memory; helping a wounded, scarred stranger piss on that first stormy night. Phil flared his nostrils against the remembered smell of rain and dipped his nose in to go in search of it against Clint’s neck. Clint was hard and strong and vital against his hand as he started to stroke. He nearly sobbed his relief that they’d come to this point at last. 

Clint hissed when Phil picked up the pace, arched, twisted his head to mumble kisses into Phil’s hair. Phil undulated with him for a few more strokes, then kissed him languid and slow.

“I’ve got you,” he whispered into Clint’s mouth and slid down, letting his lips follow the traces his nails had made all across the broad expanse of Clint’s chest, down to the hollows of his hipbones, following the trail of hair downwards. Above him, Clint trembled with the effort of holding himself still. He was unexpectedly quiet, but his entire body was busily talking to Phil, and it was saying obscene things. Begging and pleading.

Phil huffed out a gentle breath against the tip of Clint’s cock, and it bumped at him. 

“Phil,” Clint moaned, broken and low.

“Shhh,” Phil said, and lowered his lips. Clint tasted like bitter seaweed, like brine, and Phil lost himself there, nipping and nuzzling, licking and bobbing. He let his hand ring the base with a firm grip, occasionally followed by a pump.

Clint had started out so hard (flatteringly so) that Phil knew he didn’t have long, and he was determined to make the most of it. He added a careful bob or two down, trying to remember how to relax his jaw and throat. Clint’s little gasps encouraged him, and he found himself bobbing further and longer, chasing those noises. 

He had the warning of Clint’s hips and thighs going tense under him, and a strangled “Phil!” before Clint came. Phil braced himself to swallow, missed a bit just at the start because _damn_ that was fast and damn was he out of practice. But he picked it back up quickly-- one never really forgets how to ride a bike, clear the chamber of a pistol, or swallow when someone comes in your mouth. 

Clint’s hands were in his hair and he was nearly sobbing out his release as he thrust, and Phil had a brief absurd thought that this was what it was like to be one of the lucky ones.

“Thank you,” Clint whispered when Phil finally nestled back next to him on the bed, pulling the quilt up with him and covering them both against the cool night air. Phil blinked once, twice. Then threw back his head and laughed, helplessly.

Clint joined him after a moment, nuzzling at his jaw until Phil turned to look. He promptly lost himself in those eyes, in the sheer look of contentment on Clint’s face, like he was home after ages at sea or on the road.

Oh god, that was not a thing Phil could afford to consider, to entertain even for a moment. He leaned in and kissed Clint, fighting the pleasant drained feeling that was attempting to keep him stuck to the mattress.

“We should get up,” he said reluctantly. “Lots to do before the morning.”

“Mnnn,” Clint said and shifted closer in, wrapping an arm around his ribs. His hair was sweat damp and soft where Phil’s hand came up, largely of its own accord, to stroke it.

“No, really, Clint. I still need to shine my shoes and print out copies of the resume and references, and we should really go over the plan once more before we meet with Skye, and I need to make sure you have notes and know where everything for the island is in case I--”

Clint kissed him quiet.

“Yeah, prolly,” he admitted after a long pause in which all that mattered was four lips and warm limbs under linen in the falling dark. “But I want just a little longer in your bed, in case.... Just, in a minute, ‘kay?”

“Okay,” Phil said.

“Rwf!” Lucky agreed, and jumped up on the bed with a scrabble of claws. His tail was wagging with wild abandon while he began to shove at their entwined arms with his very cold, very wet, nose. He stepped across Phil’s stomach to lick at Clint’s wrist and pant.

“Aw, dog, no!” Clint said, while Phil attempted to push Lucky off. “That is _not_ a place you should be lying."

Lucky huffed at him, then glared at Phil, and settled in half-draped over the tangle of their thighs.

Clint looked at Phil. Phil looked at Clint. They both looked at Lucky. He’d put his chin down on his paws and was already looking drowsy, and his breathing was slow and warm.

“Well then,” Phil said at last, “Goodnight I guess?”

Clint laughed again, and reached out to stroke his nose. 

“Sleep tight, Phil.”

**Three**

 

Rattling in the dark woke Clint and he shot up in alarm, then realized he was alone in a strange bed-- and he shouldn’t have been alone. And not alone in the room. Also, the air was surprisingly cold and he was extremely naked. 

_Calm down, calm down. You’re not tied up. Take stock._ The sheets were cool and fine under his fingers. The blanket over his waist was heavy, and quilted in some kind of design. The air might be cool, but it was fresh, still smelled of the sea and weathered wood. His hand, when he raised it to his face, smelled of dog. And sex. Phil’s bed. Of course. 

“Clint,” Phil’s voice came from the blackness, and Clint turned towards it blindly, still vaguely panicked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Light?” Clint asked, fighting his body’s impulse to relax into the softness in that voice. He felt more than heard Phil’s pause. “Please?” he said.

“Of course, just… close your eyes a sec.” 

Clint didn’t, and the light burst in painful rosettes in his vision. He blinked wildly, found himself shaking his head like Lucky with a bee in his ear. The bed dipped next to him, and Phil set a hand on his shoulder. Fuck him anyway; the light must have been just as hard for him to bear.

“Yeah,” Phil said as if he’d heard Clint’s thoughts. “There’s no such thing as a reading light in here. Just that.” Clint opened his eyes to find Phil sitting next to him and pointing at the light fixture dangling from the ceiling, and it really was that goddamn bright. His eyes tracked its cord along the ceiling and down the far wall. 

“Ever thought of getting a table lamp or a nightlight or something?” he asked gruffly and Phil laughed.

“Yeah, sometimes, but not enough to want to bring it in a boat. I’m usually getting up about sunrise, anyway. Well,” he amended, “not in the winter. But I’m used to it, I guess.”

“What time is it, anyway?” Clint asked him, trying to keep the question casual. Phil was already half-dressed. He was wearing his jeans and a flannel shirt, so at least he hadn’t been trying to slip off to New York without waking Clint. Because regretting the morning after was one thing, but that would have jeopardized everything. They still had to meet with Skye, and if Phil went without Clint, Skye might not be able to convince him to go along with the plans she and Clint had concocted.

“Too early,” Phil replied, and dropped his hand. Clint followed it down to watch it land on his lap, then tracked back up to Phil’s face-- Phil’s vaguely worried, vaguely wrong, face. “We fell asleep too early last night, I have chores to do before we head to town.” Clint nodded his acknowledgement, but it didn’t change the look on Phil’s face; he just sat there looking up at Clint from under his lashes, and it took Clint a long moment to realize what was so very odd about him, so very wrong.

His hand drifted up without his conscious volition, and trailed along Phil’s clean-shaven chin. The line of his jaw was at once stronger and more vulnerable, faintly pale compared to the freckled skin that had been exposed to sunlight and weather all these years. And it was so soft, lotioned… Clint couldn’t stop stroking, even caressing Phil’s upper lip with one knuckle. He realized belatedly that his hand was shaking.

“You, ah, huh,” he said eventually.

“Disappointing?” Phil asked him, and his voice had taken on an airless quality. 

“No,” Clint half-whispered, then cleared his throat. “No, god. Just new.” He considered Phil for a long moment, and finally decided that the best way to tell if it was just nerves on either of their parts or an actual regret about the night before, was to just dive in. He caged Phil’s newly-shorn jawline with a palm beneath his ear and leaned in.

Kissing Phil-without-the-beard was like kissing Phil for the first time again, and Clint groaned as the wave of desire swamped him. He came up with his lips still locked on Phil’s, so smooth and somehow wetter and a little odd maybe but still so _tasty_. Phil gave a little sound, part sigh and part hum, against his mouth, and pressed closer. One hand reached down to grip Clint’s thigh beneath the covers, and Clint reeled him in by the waist to encourage him.

Flannel against his bare nipples made Clint arch, and Phil made another of those tiny helpless noises and nipped his lip before drawing back reluctantly.

“God,” he panted, forehead pressed against Clint’s, and Clint laughed and pecked him on the lips. 

Which turned into more pecks, and then some more kissing, and finally Clint himself moved back, keeping Phil at a distance with one hand against his chest, thumb rubbing fitfully at the soft nap of the flannel.

“So, uh,” he tried, knowing his voice sounded like he’d been gargling moonshine, “yeah.”

“Yeah,” Phil said. “I… ah, no regrets then?” Clint snorted and met his eyes. Yeah, he looked much better, much more Phil-like, even with his eyes hooded still from drowsiness and arousal. Clint wondered if he looked anything like that or just like a codfish, wild-eyed and gasping.

“None,” he said, and thumbed at Phil’s clean-shaven chin once more for good measure. “This is just going to take some getting used to, is all. But… in a good way, y’know?” He left it open whether he meant the lack of beard or the addition of sex, and Phil snorted and nodded.

“For me too,” he agreed. “It’s, ah, it’s been a _long_ time.” 

Clint wished he was just talking about the beard; there was something seriously wrong with a universe in which Phil Coulson could be saying that about his love life. 

Well, Clint’s gain, and if Phil wasn’t gonna take it back, Clint was damn sure not going to. 

“Sure I can’t convince you to come here and let me get some more practice? Best way to get used to something,” he said, trying his best to make himself look enticing. Phil gave him an endearingly helpless look, and pulled back.

“You _could_ , God could you, but please don’t. There are chickens to feed, the mansion to check; I’ve got to pack the suit because I don’t want to change into it before we get in the boat-- Clint, there’s so much to do and I don’t want to short our time with Skye.”

He was right, unfortunately-- and Clint would have tied Phil to a chair and stuck him in the bunker rather than letting him go to SHIELD if he hadn’t been inclined to take this seriously. It was just _unfair,_ was all. _Shoulda jumped him three days ago, then we’d have had more time_ , he thought. _Then again_.... All the urgency of preparation had kind of flown out of his head when he’d finally gotten his mouth on Phil’s. It was probably for the best that he’d waited until last night.

“Okay,” Clint leaned forward and kissed him chastely on the nose, and was rewarded with a frustrated smile. He waited until Phil rose from the bed before flinging the quilt off and-- cold, cold, cold!-- bending down to find his discarded clothing. Phil was watching him when he straightened, and Clint could practically see lust dripping off him. 

It was damned adorable, was what it was, especially telegraphed from that beardless face. 

“You’re going to kill me,” Phil said conversationally, and Clint turned away to pull on his-- Phil’s-- jeans.

“Certainly hope not,” he said. “Opposite of the point, in fact. So I’m gonna come and help you with the chickens and such, so you’ve got extra time to spend with Skye, or nap, or whatever. I want you fresh for this.”

“You want to help with the chickens? Really?” Phil asked him, and it seemed out-of-place solemn.

“Yeah, like always. Why?”

“I just… figured you’d want to sleep in.” They both looked at the bed, and Clint had a moment’s pang for the loss of the warm nest, of starfishing out in a proper bed for the first time in ages and cuddling in. And he realized that Phil must be picturing that, as well, and kissed him on the cheek. _Come back to me safely and I’ll spend all the goddamned day in your bed._

“I want to spend time with you, is what I want,” Clint said, “and I want to help you feed the goddamned chickens. Then I can make coffee while you and Lucky check the mansion and the power plant.”

“I already made coffee,” Phil said, and Clint bit back the reflexive _I love you_ at that, because it meant something entirely different this morning, dressing in the glaring artificial light of Phil’s pre-dawn bedroom, than it would have yesterday.

“Okay, fine, I see how it is. I’ll get a thermos and come with you two; you can show me how to work the power plant, in case there’s an emergency while you’re gone.”

Phil frowned at him and opened his mouth to say something, probably “I’ll be back before dark, Clint,” but he didn’t. Because he couldn’t. 

All joking about _one night of passion before you leave_ aside, there was a real possibility Phil wouldn’t be coming back, that SHIELD would sense something wrong and detain him. Melinda May was no one to be fooled with, no matter how confident Phil felt in her fondness for him from way back whenever. Clint could remember far too many ops in which her ability to sense a set-up had saved them. He’d been grateful every time-- he couldn’t be, now.

He huffed a breath and reminded himself that Phil wasn’t, despite fifteen years off the map, unversed in the game himself. Phil was a badass ex-Ranger who single-handedly saved wounded archers, fixed small hydroelectric plants, and warned off random thugs while maintaining the gruff disinterested air of an old sea salt.

Phil looked nothing like an old sea salt now; he looked much younger and distinctly worried, and for a brief moment Clint worried that he’d just been hiding his emotions behind his beard this entire time. Then Phil leaned forward, kissed him on the forehead, and handed him his boot.

“I’ll meet you outside,” he said, and Clint sighed. 

There was little point in feeling guilty unless he was gonna call this off, and he couldn’t afford to. Nor was he sure Phil would let him; ever since he’d washed to shore, Phil had been a far more all-encompassing influence on him than he’d ever have thought he’d feel comfortable with. Last night in bed had done nothing more than confirm that. Clint didn’t think he _could_ convince Phil to stop, since he’d evidently decided this was the right thing to do.

God help anyone who got between Phil Coulson and what he thought was the right thing to do.

Clint wasn’t that damned stupid.

**Four**

 

“So okay,” Skye said through a mouthful of egg sandwich, as she sat in the open door of Phil’s car. She paused to put down the sandwich, wipe her hand on her jeans, and pick up her coffee with the hand not waving a little keychain at Phil, who was leaning against the hood of the car. It was a cheap blue rubber silhouette of the Gansett Light. “Here it is.”

“That?” Clint asked, looking up at them both from his spot on the concrete bumper stop nearby as Phil took the keychain and turned it over. He grunted when Phil’s thumb found a tiny slit in the base of the lighthouse. 

“That. That’s the important one,” she agreed, and went back to nibbling the cheesy bacon ends that were sticking out of the bagel. “‘S got a chip hidden inside it.”

After retrieving Phil’s car from the back lot of the Blue Peter, where it lived during the better part of the year under Tom’s watchful eye, they’d driven down to the docks right near the state forest in order to have some privacy while they finalized plans with Skye. From here, Phil would drive down to Surf City and take the Manahawkin Bay Bridge to the mainland and the Garden State Parkway into New York. Clint had maybe memorized the route a little, simple as it was, and the probable transit time, and also told Phil where he had two separate getaway cars stowed. And where there might be a working phone booth he could check in from. And where to get a burner phone and…. 

Clint could acknowledge that he might, perhaps, have been going a little overboard, in the past couple days. That maybe Phil was capable of finding his own damn communications devices, for instance, as Phil had growled at him when Clint’d tried to go over the route one last time, babbling at him through the closed door of the men’s restroom at the Blue Peter, where Phil’d been suiting up. 

Going outside to wait had seemed like the best idea after that, and it _had_ helped to stand out on the deck in back of the restaurant, leaning over the rails and taking in the morning, the sun on the water, the seagulls griping and squabbling, the smell of seaweed and damp dunegrass and a hint of trash. Clint had been nearly calm when a handsome stranger came up behind him and ruined it all by kissing the back of his neck.

Well, that had been his first impression anyway. His second had been that he hadn’t been wrong: Phil Coulson in his suit and aviators was basically all the James Bonds rolled together into a blue pinstripe. (Minus Roger Moore, maybe, but definitely plus Daniel Craig.) 

As distractions went, it was the most effective one Clint’d ever encountered. 

If they were a little late to their meeting with Skye, neither of them expressed much regret. She’d done the Outrageous Egg run this time, and when they drove up, she was waiting with three hot coffees and several more greasy sacks. 

Clint’s sandwich had been quickly dispatched; two eggs, bacon, cheddar _and_ pepperjack cheeses, and french toast outsides all demolished within moments, despite the fact that his stomach was emphatically telling him it preferred to be writhing in anxiety. Clint had quietly assured it that it could writhe just as well full as empty, and furthermore, it could handle some more coffee, too.

“I know it doesn’t look like much,” Skye continued, “but that chip’ll mimic a wireless router, it’ll automatically get any computer near it to connect to it. While it’s up, it’ll transmit off SHIELD frequencies, if it can find any that meet the specs I gave it. I don’t want it transmitting if it’s just gonna get us traced. So, if it transmits I’ll pick it up and try to direct it to what we need, plus anything I can find on Quinn, or Project Centipede or whatever. If it’s not safe to transmit, it’s set to grab all the files it can off the servers. When you get back, you give it to me and I’ll sort it all out here.”

“Hrmph,” Phil said, and slipped the keychain into his pocket before sipping on his own coffee. “If you’re able to hack in, grab a few things that don’t concern us at all, too, but would concern Quinn. Thoughts, Clint?” 

Clint thought Phil hadn’t eaten nearly enough of his egg sandwich, was what Clint thought, and there was no way Clint was going to let him go into SHIELD on an empty belly. He glared at the modest little english muffin-and-porkroll affair sitting on the hood of the car, then at Phil, who smiled at him repentantly and lifted it to his mouth. 

“I’ll give you a list, Skye,” Clint said, mollified, as Phil bit down. “If you’re searching all the Avengers, that should hide any interest in me, but try to pull data on Agent Amador and Agent Hand; I bet they’re the ones who dealt with Quinn. ” 

Phil grunted agreement. Clint picked a crumb of muffin off his lapel and flung it towards the nearest seagull hanging out along the dockside. The moment he did it, he realized he was absurdly concerned that Phil’s suit not get dirty. It reminded him of his reaction to Phil’s clean-shaven face that morning: cut adrift and hopelessly lustful at the same time.

Phil Coulson in a suit was a world away from his gruff, scruffy island keeper, and Clint didn’t know exactly what to do with the handsome, polished stranger in the tailored navy pinstripe who’d taken his place. He only knew that he wanted him to remain handsome and polished, and free. Which led back to… he glanced over at Skye, and she nodded at him.

“This one’s a late addition, boss,” she told Phil, and held out something else. Phil took it curiously, then glanced at them both. It was a tie pin, one of those Captain America shield ones they’d found in the crates currently being stored back in the research bunker. 

“There’s a bug under the enamel,” Skye told him. “A listening device. So Clint’n’I know what’s going on.”

Not that it was going to help if Phil was detained, but at least Clint wouldn’t go crazy waiting for him to come home. Phil raised both eyebrows now and turned towards him, and Clint tried to look resolute.

“Isn’t that likely to get spotted?” he asked. Skye shook her head.

“No. I did a little testing and poking around with it, and they should be pretty well concealed. I didn’t put the bug there-- I think Quinn was planning on using these himself.”

“That explains why they were packed on his private yacht for transport. But why didn’t we see these the first time we checked them out?” Phil said, and Skye gestured at Clint.

“Only a few of the pins had them,” he said, and raised his hands to ward off a glare. “Skye and I’d been going through the boxes a couple at a time, the last few days, but we didn’t find one with a bug ‘till yesterday. And then, well… I figured we’d tell you about if _if_ Skye could get it to work.” _And maybe I was a bit of a high-handed SOB. So sue me._

“Which she did.” Phil held his eyes for a long moment, tie pin forgotten in his hand. Just when Clint thought he was going to pass out, waiting to breathe, Phil shrugged, like a duck rolling water off its back, and nodded. “And then you told me.”

“And then I told you.” Clint gently removed the pin from his hand. “And Skye’s checked to make sure they don’t transmit anything back to Quinn. But if they _are_ found….”

“At least I look like Quinn’s stooge, and not yours,” Phil said. Clint snorted, then slid one finger up under his tie, and carefully pushed the pin through the fine-grained fabric and fastened it. Phil was watching him, breath warm on his forehead, and Clint closed his eyes, smoothed the tie back down, and stepped back a half-step, just far enough to be able to meet Phil’s gaze.

“Looking awfully good for a stooge,” he said. “Try another word. Like ‘hero,’ f’r instance.”

Skye’s snort behind him made him grin, and Clint gave into the temptation in front of him, and leaned in and kissed Phil. He took his time about it, one last opportunity to memorize the way his mouth tasted, Phil-taste under the cheese and butter. Phil’s smile was amused under his lips.

“Okay, god, stop already, I get it,” Skye grumbled, and they turned slowly. She looked less disgruntled and more impressed, an impression she reinforced by reaching out to punch Phil in the arm. “About time, boss. Good work. Now, can we get to the part where we figure out who’s doing what when?”

“Sure,” Clint said, and Phil nodded. He sat back and listened to Phil talk logistics, with Skye’s occasional comment or input, and felt the lead weights settle in his gut.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t going to be seeing Phil for a while. 

**Five**

Clint sat curled up on the rickety little cot in Skye’s van as she hunched over her laptop and tapped away, cursing occasionally. The van was tucked into a white gravelled parking lot, catty-corner from the gray-shingled house inhabited by the “How You Brewin’” internet cafe. (It was also right across from the “Historic Viking Village” shops, which were modeled after a 1920s fishing settlement and _not_ a longhouse. Clint had seen the sign and thought briefly of Thor’s disappointment, if he’d seen it. It would have lasted about a minute and a half before he found the nearest brewpub; this was one of the things Clint liked most about Thor. He had a kind of lilies of the field attitude towards travel that Clint identified with well.) 

Skye was using the cafe as some kind of elaborate arcane cover, burying her signal in the many originating from that point, while apparently also spoofing it so it looked like it came from Russia or something and running it through a darknet something-- Clint didn’t pretend to understand it all. She’d told him it was a trick she’d used with SHIELD before, and emerged undetected and unscathed.

That did not make him feel better about SHIELD, not even when she shrugged offhandedly and said she was probably the only member of the ‘Tide-- Miles excepted (Miles? Who he?) who could do it. _They’ve been too shorthanded for too long, I guess. How many people can you lose before you just can’t function?_ It was good news for them-- and for Phil, currently inside the lion’s den, but Clint’s residual loyalty to the organization that had pulled him back to his feet and kept him there, sometimes by main force, flared a little at the thought.

“Is there anything I can do?” he’d asked Skye early on, and literally the only part he could follow of her answer was:

“Not unless you can….” The rest of her sentence sounded to him like Charlie Brown’s teacher. He was quite sure she was being deliberately obscure. 

What he _was_ following was the fact that Phil ought to have started the interview with Melinda May fifteen minutes ago, and they still didn’t have a good feed through the little Captain America shield. It was slowly driving him _batty_.

“Maybe SHIELD’s just that well, um, shielded?” he asked when Skye reared back to throw her mouse across the room. She turned and glared at him through her wild bangs, and Clint bit his lip. “I’m sorry, I’m not bad at this shit, but I’m not exactly in Tony’s league.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not really in Stark’s league either,” Skye muttered, but she put down the mouse.

“Nah,” Clint unfolded himself and came over to crouch by her, looking up at the laptop with her. “You’re not in JARVIS’s league, but he’s a freakin’ AI. Tony, though…” he set a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve done all right so far. Can I, I dunno… get you coffee or something?”

“Yeah,” she said on a sigh, and he felt her shoulders slump under his palm. “Coffee’d be great. Clint--” she said, as he turned to slip out the side door. He turned to find her face twisted into something almost rodent-like by her concern. “I’m sorry I’m not doing better.”

“We’ll get him yet,” Clint said, “and if we don’t, we’ll see him when he comes home. You keep on rockin’ it, girl.” Because after all, if Phil came home-- _when_ Phil came home-- Clint would be sleeping with the chickens if he hadn't done something about the look of failure on Skye’s face.

 _Holy shit, I could actually be sharing a bed with Phil that he could kick me out of tonight,_ Clint thought, stopping short with a crunch in the middle of the lot. Okay, so the thought was kind of muddled, but the important part was the whole potential bed-share. _Fuck it, Phil, you’re not allowed to go and get captured on me now. Not when I just bought condoms._ (Which he’d almost not done, figuring it was just begging fate. The desperate desire to be properly prepared next time had overridden superstition, and all worry about local gossip, too.)

An absurd smile floated on top of the mass of anxiety rolling through his digestive system, and Clint shook his head and went off to get coffee and clear his mind a little.

When he got back, Skye leapt from her chair and spun to face him with a grin, pulling off and unplugging her headphones as she did.

“...in the annual budget. But I’ll be honest, Melinda, I’m the only person who _is_ on North Bar year ‘round, I’m not exactly a manager of staff.” Phil’s voice came hollow from the laptop’s speakers, but it sounded so light, so assured, so _Coulson_ that Clint had to close his eyes to hold back some really unexpected tears.

 _What the hell, Barton? Did one night turn you into a freakin’ soap opera heroine or something?_

“You got it!” he said, to cover the lump in his throat, and Skye nodded happily and slugged back a celebratory swig of coffee, regardless of its heat. 

“Not long after you left. Hasn’t been really interesting or I’d have texted you. They’re going over all the shit he’s been doing on North Bar the last decade or so, is all. Did _you_ know he’s been on, like, five SAR call-outs in the last couple years?” she asked.

“Vaguely,” Clint said, and sat. _Vaguely_ covered a _lot_ of what he knew about Phil’s past and present. That was going to have to change, if they were going to keep doing this. Before they encountered another surprise like Melinda May-- or like Corporal Hollis, who Clint was never going to be able to think of without a bitter curl to his gut.

“Well, Phil, let’s talk about SHIELD’s training and background checks,” Agent May was saying, and Clint couldn’t remember her being quite so relaxed any time since Bahrain.

“Wow, how big is the stick up her ass?” Skye muttered, and Clint snorted. “Is there not going to be a tour after all? Will he be able to get close enough to the servers? I did _tell_ him where they were.”

“I’d love to see the training facilities, if they’re open,” Phil was saying now, and Clint waved Skye quiet. She went still, braced and waiting, as Melinda reeled off a set of regulations and restrictions and Clint wasn’t sure whether that was by way of a yes or a no.

“Come _on_ ,” Skye said. “Go give him the tour, go go go. I need _action_ here.” 

“Shhhh,” Clint said, and then stopped and froze, because over the line, something slammed. Hard. And then there was another voice in the room.

“Thank you, Agent May, good stalling. Phillip Coulson,” said a new voice, a deep one with a truly chilling growl. Clint felt the receding tide of anxiety come roaring back, crashing over him in an icy wave. Oh holy shit, _holy shit_ , it couldn’t really be--

“You’re in a goddamn world of trouble. And you’re comin’ with me. _Now_ ,” said Director Nick Fury, and when Skye turned to him, Clint knew her panic was reflected in his face.

\----  
To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on Washed Ashore: Director Nicholas Fury of SHIELD, y’all.
> 
> Yes, dear readers, I know: evil. 
> 
> But I could have been even _more_ evil. Washed Ashore is taking a two-week hiatus, but it doesn't start until after Chapter 11 posts on Sept. 7.
> 
> Chapter 12 will post on Sunday, Sept. 21. Due to the fic-surgery that brought y’all the kiss a week early, plus life events**, I’ve about destroyed my buffer, and that means rushed writing. Washed Ashore and you readers don't deserve that.
> 
> In addition, faeleverte and I have a hard deadline for “Recovery” of before the Sept 23rd Agents of SHIELD premiere, so we both are writing our tails off to get that posted.
> 
> As usual, I’ll try to have a treat or two during the hiatus, on the [Washed Ashore tag](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/tagged/Washed-Ashore) on Tumblr. And, somewhat belatedly, here's this chapter's [tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/96324690846/washed-ashore-chapter-10), including the How You Brewin', Grizzly Adams, and gratuitious bearded Renner.
> 
> ** They’re welcome life events, like my tenth anniversary and a visit from long-distance friends, but they do take a toll on writing time.


	11. Lee Shore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SHIELD, and what Phil did there; North Bar, and what Kate found there; and Avengers Tower and what Tony said there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: Phil better hope the chickens aren't the jealous types.

**One**

 

The interview had been going well up to that point, or so Phil’d thought. To be sure, walking into SHIELD was an exercise in well-throttled terror. From the second he hit the entryway he’d had Clint’s warnings in his head. _There’s a full-body scanner in the front doors themselves, even before you hit the detectors by reception._ He passed through, tensing slightly, but no one looked up at him as he came out into the stories-tall atrium.  
 _There’s always at least one agent with a rifle on the second floor balcony, behind the potted plant._ He managed just in time not to look up at it. 

The receptionist had his name _they’ll have done a general background check on you already_ and waved him to a mid-century modern chair to wait. _The aluminum is usually a bit sticky, and it’s that horrible scratchy stuff. I think they put it there just to make you uncomfortable._

It wasn’t any more terrifying than going through Sandy had been, crouched in his bedroom under the eaves, with his bottled water and his lanterns, hearing the rain slam against the boarded-up windows. Just a waiting game. He’d been doing those since long before he met anyone from SHIELD, much less shed blood next to them. If anything, the nerves gave verisimilitude to the thin excuse he’d fed Melinda, the _I’m thinking about a career change_ that covered-- was supposed to cover-- some deeper dissatisfaction with his chickens and his dog and his island. And his “cousin….” Phil was lost in the memories of the night before, when Melinda May came up to him. She stood over him, arms crossed, face like stone, every point and tuck on her pantsuit correct, her white oxford open the regulation two buttons. 

He nearly laughed at her.

“My god, you look different without your tac suit,” he said, standing up, and the corners of her eyes went soft.

“Good to see you again, Coulson,” she said. “Come with me.”

He’d expected the sterile conference room, too-- somehow, Clint had managed to pick the exact room out of five that she’d take him to. _Close to the bathroom, but it’s kind of recessed, so she can see how good you are about spotting details on the walk. Full video access, of course, can lock down, and anyone can jam a signal from there. If they know it exists._

So they sat, and Phil went to that place in his mind he went when dealing with Doc Halliday; the calm, even place in which he could paddle on top of the water happily even knowing there were sharks waiting for his least flail. 

“So what makes me special?” Melinda asked him after a moment, and Phil blinked and heard the Jaws theme start up in the back of his mind.

“Huh?” he said.

“When you decided to come back to civilization, try and get back in the game, why SHIELD, and why me? Out of everyone here you could have contacted?” she asked, and leaned forward. Her eyes were mild and curious and _she once broke the neck of an armed guard using her thighs do not ever forget that, Phil._

“Well,” he replied, and shrugged, feeling, in his suit, like a hermit crab that had just settled in to a new, slightly-too-big home, “of all my old contacts I figured you were least likely to be dead. Or HYDRA. And because I could remember your email address.” And then he gave her his best butter-wouldn’t-melt smile, one he’d perfected over years of budget meetings, and into which he’d recently incorporated perhaps a little element of flip, stolen off of Clint.

Melinda set her pen aside, leaned forward, and _stared_ at him. 

After a long moment, at least thirteen ticks by the little clock on the wall above him _the second hand runs slow, and it conceals a gas canister_ , she dropped her head. Somewhere under the dark wing of her hair, Phil knew, there was a ghost of a smile. _Any little victory,_ he thought.

“It's good to see you again, Phil.” 

At that, Phil could have sworn even the molecules of air in the room became a little friendlier, a little spacier, and he let himself relax a fraction. There was the Melinda May he’d known in the Balkans, in the Middle East, the woman with the deadpan that concealed a wicked and often destructive sense of humor. Clint had warned him about her, too, but warning hadn’t been enough to prepare him for quite how odd it was to see Senior Agent Melinda May, who more than half ran Human Resources after the culling of HYDRA, in the place of “God fucking _damn_ it, May.” 

“Good to see you, too,” he said, and in that moment it was very real, despite the fact that he was smuggling in a listening device on his tie, or that he was about to try to manipulate her into letting him get close enough to Security’s servers that Skye’s little trojan lighthouse could go to work. Most of him just wanted to get this over with and get safely out and back home to his island and grab Clint and drag him off to bed _must get condoms on the way home_ and rejoice in being out and safe. But a little traitorous niggling part was starting to wake up in the back of his brain, and he could swear he heard it laugh.

“So,” Melinda said, and Phil thought that maybe there was someone giggling behind her eyes too, “what have you been doing with yourself for the past fifteen years?”

Everything was going fine after that, Phil was nearly enjoying himself as they discussed him being a hermit, her being a desk jockey, the many and varied opportunities at SHIELD, just what working for Stark Industries _meant_ , benefits and responsibilities-wise, for the Keeper of North Bar (the title got a patented Melinda snort), and he finally, finally had her worked around-- he thought-- to a tour, when it all went south, and the door burst open.  
“Phillip Coulson,” said the intruder, and Phil jerked like a startled rabbit and felt his eyes go wide before he could manage to stop them, “you’re in a goddamn world of trouble. And you’re comin’ with me. _Now_.” 

It was pure growl, delivered by a man with the presence and dress sense of Othello if his costumer had been going for futuristic space pirate. Which meant, really, that this had to be Nicholas Fury himself, Director of SHIELD and the only man on record to go before a Senate subcommittee in an all-black Nehru suit. So of course Phil’s heart was going a mile a minute, and of fucking _course_ his mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders, because Clint was going to kill him. Clint was going to try to rescue him, get stuffed into the Fridge with him, and sneak out of his cell at night to come _kill Phil_ for this.

What Phil hadn’t expected-- and he blamed instinct, he really did, and instinct had gotten him into a hell of a lot of trouble in the past, but it’d also gotten him _out_ \-- was to hear himself say:

“But you’re dead!”

Director Fury’s glare behind that single, really spectacularly distracting eyepatch, took on a couple more sub-levels of meaning.

“You sound like Congress. Wishful thinking. No one else was around to run this crap, I didn’t get lucky enough to stay dead. And you _know_ that.”

“No,” Phil struggled to his feet, because he needed a different view, and anyway he wasn’t going to have this conversation from way down in the visitor’s chair. “ _Marcus_ , I mean you died. I saw you go down.” He turned to glare at Melinda May, who was sitting quietly with her hands folded in front of her on the desk and a suspiciously blank face. “Unless that was all wishful thinking, too.”

Phil remembered the blood soaking into his gloves, remembered Marcus Johnson’s face, grinning up at him just briefly before he slumped back unconscious. Before his team pulled him off Phil’s lap and to a waiting evac chopper. Phil’d stayed slumped on the blasted hillside with its cracked slate, while Holly crouched next to him, not-quite touching his shoulder in sympathy. Holly’d liked Marcus. Everyone did. 

Phil'd lost a brother.

“Oh. That. You telling me you bought that line?"

"Your blood ruining my nice new watch made for a hell of an argument." He'd thrown it away, pretended it was broken. He couldn't get the stains to come off the adjustable dials, the recessed slots for the miniscule buttons, the ridges of the watchband.

"Damnit, Cheese,” Marcus Johnson said, and half the anger slid off his face. “Get the hell over here and say hello. Eighteen years is too goddamn long.” 

He grabbed Phil’s hand and pulled him forward before he could protest, bracing him with an arm on his sleeve.

They didn’t hug.

Barely.

The someone behind Melinda’s eyes was probably rolling on the floor in full-throated guffaws about now. She had a horrible sense of humor.

“Seriously, though, Marcus. You, what? Faked your death, got a new name, popped on an eyepatch and a leather coat and voila, Director Nick Fury?” He should be shutting up now, Phil _knew_ he should be shutting up now. Dead or not-dead, this wasn’t his Marcus Johnson anymore, either. The kind of immediate banter he’d fallen into with the SHIELD Agent-in-Charge, despite the difference in their ages, back in the bad old detached service days, was completely inappropriate now. But Phil’d lost his footing on the tsunami that came in with Nick Fury, and when he was fighting to stay afloat, his mouth tended to get a bit beyond him.

“I was only partly faking, it was a near-run thing. SHIELD took me offline for a year to go chasing ghosts. Heard you were out of the service when I got back. The eyepatch I earned the hard way,” Marcus-- Fury-- said, and flipped it up. The eye underneath was milky and split, and scars radiated from it.

“That’ll teach you to stop peeking into nests,” Phil muttered, while the back of his brain tried to slap sense into him.

“Taught me not to trust anyone,” Fury shrugged, then abruptly gathered his anger back to himself like buttoning up a coat. “And that brings us to _you_ , you asshole.”

“Me?” Phil asked, glad he didn’t have to pretend to be as confused as he actually was.

“You. Damnit, Cheese, you walk in here now after eighteen years, that damned moonpie look on your face, and you expect me not to be angry? _You_ I trusted.”

Oh, well, there went any sense of relief he’d been feeling. It had been nice while it lasted.

Fury reached over and grabbed his arm again, this time tugging Phil straight into his orbit. _I’ll never be seen again. Clint won’t know where to begin to look._

“C’mon, Cheese. You’ve got an appointment.”

 

**Two**

 

The van's ceiling was far too low for the maneuver Clint tried to execute, jumping up while spinning and heading for the exit. His head clanged off the roof. That there was no reasonable way for him to white knight his way to New York in anything under two hours-- Skye's van not possessing faster-than-light travel and he himself not being able to teleport-- but his reflexes were trying to get him there anyway. 

"Shhhh," Skye hissed at him as he fell back onto her cot with a groan, hands covering his injured crown. "What the hell? 'Marcus?' Clint, who's Marcus?" 

"Marcus?" Clint asked, and sat forward, trying to listen past the sound of blood pounding in his ears. Over the audio feed, Phil was indeed asking 'Marcus' why, essentially, he was not dead. And Director Nick Fury was calling him _Cheese_. 

It was the "Cheese" that convinced Clint, somehow. The final absurd nail in the coffin. 

"Nick Fury," Clint hissed back at Skye. "'Marcus' is Director Nick Fury." His former boss, his former Commanding Officer, and before that Supervising Officer-- and sometimes, he nearly thought, his friend. Skye raised her eyebrows, and they both listened in silence as it became inescapably obvious that not only had Phil _known_ Fury, they'd been some kind of war buddies. Un-war buddies. Inter-agency cooperation buddies.

And that Phil'd thought Marcus was dead, so Clint would refrain from killing him when he got home.

If. 

_If_ Phil got home today, because now Marc-- Fury-- was saying "C'mon Cheese, you've got an appointment," and on the audio track a door was slamming. 

"No," Clint whispered, hardly conscious he was doing so until he heard it come out. "No no no no no." He leaned forward, desperate to catch every tiny background noise, until it felt like he was leaning right out of his skin and into the laptop speakers. When Skye clutched at his arm, her own hands shaky, it came from a great distance indeed, and he laid his hand on top of hers mechanically.

"It'd help if you told me what the fuck was going on, Marcus," Phil said over the audio, and his voice was already shifting a little, matching Fury's intonations. Going back in time eighteen years, maybe. 

"You know you could have called Melinda or the others any time in the last decade and a half, Cheese. Emailed. Sent a carrier pigeon. Told one of us when you left the Army. SHIELD could have used you. _Needed_ you. But hey, we weren’t going to kidnap you. You had _friends_ here who would have helped, you didn't have to go off and hide yourself under a rock to avoid them till you’d finished getting your head on straight. But no, you had to come into my parlor _now_ , like this. With your damn resume in hand and your good suit on and your fresh shave. How the hell long did you have a beard for, anyway?"

"About fifteen years," Phil said, his voice hollow either from whatever they were walking through, or something else.

"Damn, that's a lot of years to shave off for just an informational interview. Seems like a bigger commitment than that to me." There was a pause, and Clint knew he was missing an exchange of gestures. "Man are you going to be sorry."

Skye let go of Clint's arm, only to start tapping frantically at the keyboard on the laptop. Why the hell did simple typing suddenly sound so loud? He pressed a fist to his mouth to keep from yelling at her and curled further into a ball. _Damn condoms. Knew I was pushing my luck._

"I'm so fucking sorry I didn't want to deal with yet more sub-rosa garbage, Marcus. My apologies for wanting a normal life. You were capable of finding me if you wanted me."

"Clint," Skye hit him, and he whipped around to stare at her. Her eyes were wild and her hands were shaking just a tiny bit, but something in her was coiled and intent. "Where are they going? Can you tell?"

"Uh..." Clint paused, trying to think back to the quality of the footsteps he was hearing, the background hum, the number of steps.... "out the back way. Not the front. Cutting through--" he heard paper rustle, and the slap of something that might have been a file folder against the tie pin.

"Maybe I asked. Maybe it looked like you were done dealing with sub-rosa garbage. Hold those," Fury said.

"-- okay, that's the printer I'm hearing, so they're back in the HR cube farm now. At the rate they're going though--"

"Will they go past the servers, Clint?" Skye cut him off. Servers? For a moment Clint's mind was a blank, then he wanted to snap back at her.

"Yeah, but real fast," he said instead, because Skye wasn't _wrong_ to be preoccupied with trying to salvage something from this shitstorm. It might be their only hope to free Phil. "How long would it take?"

"If they don't slow down? Too long," she said.

Phil was still talking, and papers were flipping, "--are these? Marcus?"

"Paperwork," Fury said, and Clint and Skye both froze and blinked at the laptop screen, as if it could somehow explain. _I've seen forms-based interrogations before, but even for Fury, that would be--_

"For what?"

There was a sigh, a big, deep, heaving _God, you're a dumbass aren't you_ Fury sigh, of a kind Clint had more than a passing acquaintance with over the years. _Did he have that sigh before meeting "Cheese," or did it start with Phil?_

"You know what happened to Hawkeye," Fury said, and Clint and Skye spit out coffee simultaneously.

"I... know what I read in the papers?" Phil tried, in that same _let me just waltz my way over the back of this sleeping hippo and see what happens_ voice he'd been using for much of the conversation. "But I'm not sure what an Avenger drowning while running off to have his alien baby out of wedlock love child in South Korea has to do with me and paperwork."

In the background, the printers were still humming. A tiny portion of Clint's brain was tugging at him, trying to get him to ask Skye something... something about servers. The rest of it, however, was in the midst of a full-out core meltdown complete with pulsing lights and wailing klaxons. The war between alarm and amusement had been too much for it to handle.

"Never figured you for a tabloid-reading man, Phil."

"I may have changed a bit." 

"Bullshit you have. Five minutes with me and you still curse like a sailor and snark like a teenage girl. And you haven't run out screaming so you're either still too fucking curious for your own good or have lost what little sense of self-preservation you ever possessed.”

 _Oh good,_ Clint thought, sighing, _at least it’s not just me._

“You want to know what it has to do with you?” Fury continued, “It means there's an entire Tower of honest-to-god superheroes, whose relationship with SHIELD is just a wee bit strained right now. Doesn't matter if Barton did it or not, if he's dead or not, they can’t get over that SHIELD came for their friend and he _jumped out of a goddamned window._ Don’t look at me that way, I don’t make that shit up.”

“I’m not sure whether to be impressed or to take that as a warning. But I can see where his teammates might become a little disaffected with SHIELD.”

“I usually went with both. But, yeah, ‘disaffected.’ Mountains of ‘disaffection.’ Which is a problem, Cheese, because they need SHIELD, much as they like to think otherwise. They need SHIELD's intel, they need our clean-up squads, our logistical support. One more push, and Stark’s gonna go private and try and get all that from Stark Industries, work more with the CIA and NSA and other alphabets. Sound like a good idea to you, to have that all private or in the hands of our _friends_ at Langley?"

Clint wondered if Phil was remembering Archstone and Corporal Hollis, abandoned in the wilderness. _Not that Tony would ever allow Archstone levels of incompetence in anything he turned his hands to._

"I... thought he got out of the weapons business." Phil said slowly.

"Very perceptive," Fury snorted. "He still thinks he did, too, even with his 'privatizing global security' bull. Don't know if he's realized yet that in some ways, he holds the world's most effective weapons in his tower. No, SHIELD could use the Avengers, they make our jobs easier and give us clout on Capitol Hill-- which God knows we need. But the Avengers need SHIELD, whether or not they know it. Gonna get themselves into so much fucking trouble otherwise. And that's where your job offer comes in."

"My... what?"

It was unfair just how much Phil, in his shock, sounded like he had last night, when Clint had compared him to a mountain man while they were in the middle of foreplay. Clint tried to hold onto that, because it was the only thing between him and panic.

"Damnit, Cheese, don't stop."

"Yes stop! Stop and stay stopped!" Skye hissed at the laptop. "You're nearly there! I'm getting a ping... shit."

"Shit?" Clint forced his brain to come back online, and spun to look at her. "What kind of shit? Like, 'he's been spotted' shit? Like 'there's so much information' shit? Like 'there's no information' shit, or like 'the velociraptors learned how to open doors' shit?"

"Um, like, they're right on the edge of effective range, and it's going slow, that kinda shit. Also," she pushed her hair out of her eyes as she looked up at him. "It's not gonna transmit-- so unless Phil gets out of there somehow, we've got no data. Clint if we do--"

Clint shushed her with a hand over her mouth. Fury was still talking.

"... don't give me that, I saw you in action, Cheese. You can't fake it, the way you had of herding men so's they didn't know you were doing it, and not only that, they thought it was their idea. That's exactly what I need right now."

"But... security clearance..."

"It'd be low, but you'd know what you need to help the Avengers, or could get a brief. Your job’ll be mostly support, not intelligence gathering. Anyway never even mind your clearance with the Army before you left, do you know just how fuckin' high your ops with me were classified?"

"High enough that no one thought I needed to know you hadn't died." The bitterness was still there in Phil's tone, only partly hidden under a thin veneer of snark. Fury paused.

"Well next time, send a postcard to May. Takes two to completely fail to tango, Phil. Look, we can go into personal dynamics later. We need to get going, or we're gonna be late."

"So where _are_ we going?" Phil asked, and Clint held his breath.

"Avengers Tower. You have an appointment with Tony Stark, to convince him you're their next liaison."

Clint had thought his brain had it bad before; Clint should have just fainted while he was ahead. Phil. As Avengers liaison. _Phil_. As Avengers. Liaison. What the hell had happened to Hand? And how was Phil even remotely qualified? Apart from being Fury's buddy. And ex-black ops Ranger. And handling one Avenger (ahem) quite well indeed. 

Apart from Clint, however, who the hell had Phil herded in the last fifteen years besides chickens and blue-haired ladies-- and research scientists. And maybe SAR teams. At any rate. None of those were anything close to a superhero team.

Not that anything was. He looked over at Skye. She was making little circling gestures at her laptop screen, as if she could speed up time and the download by sympathetic magic. _Just say no and come home to us, baby._

"But... Marcus... Nick... what if I don't _want_ the job?" Phil asked, and Clint nodded sharply. 

"Then tell Stark that. But why would you be here wasting May's time if you didn't want a job? Think SHIELD has anything half as fun on offer? C'mon, time to go."

Footsteps and the shuffle of paper filled the speakers.

"Just tell me one thing, Marcus," Phil grumbled, "when did you decide on this idiotic offer?"

There was a laugh over the speakers.

"Melinda showed me your email when it came through. She knew I'd been grumbling for years that I needed Cheese."

"Ah. So basically, it was a trap from the start."

"Hell yeah," Director Fury said. Clint closed his eyes and just let the bitter irony flow through him for a moment. Skye cursed next to him.

"They've moved out of range," she said. "I don't know how much it got. If anything. You got a plan B, backup-Boss?"

"Yeah, but it involved a jail break."

 _Which might still be necessary,_ Clint thought. _Phil's going to Avenger's Tower, the home of JARVIS, with two bugs on him. So I might not have a choice._

 

**Three**

 

The chickens were out in force, watching Kate from behind their wire. They and a one-eyed mutt seemed to be the only residents of North Bar who were around for her to bother. She'd half expected that, since the little red runabout wasn't at its berth when she arrived. And of course, she was _happier_ this way, this was what she’d _hoped_ for, to be entirely alone for once. Well, alone except for the dog, who'd appeared when she entered the cottage's fenced-in backyard, slinking out of the big barn door of the larger shed and coming up to sniff at her hand. 

That one sniff was apparently all the dog needed, because he whined and fell into step beside her. (Probably trailing her to make sure she didn’t make off with any chickens; she didn’t exactly have the kind of personality that people and dogs fell all over at first scent.)

Okay. Well, maybe she _hadn’t_ necessarily wanted to be all alone after all-- even if he was sizing her up in case he needed to take her down, the expectant lick of his nose the dog gave her gooified something in her ribcage.

"As long as you're here," she told the dog, who whuffled up at her, "maybe you can come with me and watch me shoot?" It wouldn't be as good as having Frank Barney there, the insufferable jerk. If he were there, she could cajole or dare him into trying that stupid arrow-in-arrow trick, then laugh at him. Watch those big, powerful shoulder and arm muscles in action... to... to study how he drew her bow.

Of course.

And maybe while he was shooting, she could get him to complain to her about Coulson, and she could be all sympathetic, and they could go back to the Blue Peter so she could let him vent. And maybe America would see them there.

And if she saw them, sitting together in a booth and talking about risers and nocking and how Phil Coulson was a cynical jerkface who didn’t appreciate a true hero the way he should, well…. Maybe America would glower in that way she did at Kate sometimes, all intense but also conflicted like how _dare_ Kate get her so worked up that she'd actually lose her cool and pout.

It really was an amazing pout too, the way her lips--

Kate could actually _hear_ the record scratch in her head.

_Oh my god, I really need to go shoot something._

She could feel the chickens' beady little eyes turned on her as she walked past their coop on her way to the shed, pulled on the unlatched padlock, and withdrew her bow. Prickles ran up and down her spine as she slung it over her shoulder, and the chickens all suddenly went still, then fluttered and fled for their hutch. 

Kate hadn't thought chickens were that, well, _flighty_ , and she huffed at them.

"Hey, bird brains, if that's all it takes to scare you, you're in for a tough life," she said.

"T'be fair to the chickens, chica, you're one scary lady when you want to be."

Kate nearly stumbled in her haste to turn around. America was sitting on the back stoop, her long legs spread down the stairs, knees fallen open and revealing the lean lines of her inner thigh, ankles trim under a pair of Converse. The way she was leaning back skewed her chopped-up sweatshirt, revealing a curve of shoulder just begging to be nibbled.

 _So the time I’ve spent avoiding her didn't help with that little problem_ Kate sighed. 

"America, what the hell are you doing here? Did you follow me?"

"Of course I did. You keep running away from me, Princess, not much else I could do." America stretched and rolled to her feet, starting to close the distance between them. Kate backed up, hoping she could keep her heart under control, because if it came any higher into her throat it was going to end up in her nostrils.

"I wasn't running from you," Kate grumbled, and slid past her to the gate. Or she tried to, anyway. The dog was still pacing her and he managed to get tangled in her calves as she went to unlatch the gate. She went over in a spectacularly undignified fashion, landing butt-first in the damp earth. The impact jolted her arrows from their quiver, and she ended up spread-eagled in their midst.

What was worst, though, worse than the indignity, worse than the pain in her shoulders and tailbone and rear? Was that she wound up staring up at America who was silhouetted by the bright cloudless sky, haloed by the warm dark drifts of her hair, and laughing so damn hard she was snorting.

\----

Silence prevailed on the walk down the path that led past the mansion to the archery butts. America trailed a half-step behind Kate, ranged on her right side, and cast her sidelong glances from time to time.

"He doesn't like you," America said after a while, and Kate whipped around to stare at her, despite having told herself just the moment before that she was, on no account, no matter what came out of America's mouth, going to give her the satisfaction of a reaction. "I saw him with his cousin the other night and chica, let me tell you, you could cut the romantic tension with a knife. So I promise you, whatever he's been telling you, he doesn't like you that way."

"Yeah well," Kate replied, pulling her quiver more fully onto her back and then carefully arranging the strap against her chest, "last I saw, he was screaming and calling Coulson a high-handed son of a bitch. Does that sound like two people who _like_ each other?"

America looked away from Kate and over at the mansion. It gleamed in the sun, windows dark, paint chipped, and, nevertheless, spellbinding, like they should have suddenly found themselves decked in white linen and Irish lace just through proximity. This close to her, Kate could see the little mole behind America's ear, the tangles in her curls, the way her sweatshirt was starting to wear thin around the seams, the way she was, nevertheless, gorgeous. The quiver on her back and her shoes hitting the hard ground were the only things anchoring Kate to reality at that moment. She thought she might float into space otherwise, sublimate, leak into the ground, she was so weak at the knees. 

"I dunno, Princess, sounds a lot like you and me, from here." 

It had to be the silence here on North Bar, that had to be what was making America’s voice sound so breathy and full, with enough substrata it probably contained fossils. Little broken primeval shells, maybe.

"That's my point," Kate said, ignoring the way that voice rumbled things up deep inside her. "Just like you and me. And I don't care whether you like Frank; I do. He's... well, he's hot-- I’d have to hand in my straight girl card if I didn’t see _that_. But that’s not the point. He knows archery, and who the hell else does in this piddly little town? And he challenges me... you should have seen me shoot, really, it was just... I wanted to be _better_ when he was around. I mean, he’s a jerk half the time, and he’s not as smooth as he thinks he is. It’s kind of cute really. There's, I dunno... there's just a connection, okay, America?" _And I don't want to jump his old-enough-to-be-my-Dad bones okay? Much. Not much._

They were rounding the last edge of the mansion now, coming down past the rose bushes with their fat red hips, and _those_ , at least, did not send Kate into rhapsodies about any part of America's anatomy. _That I've seen._ She groaned, and tried to inch away without being obvious about it. 

So of course America reeled her back in, as they came up to the stumps with their mangled paper targets. There were two arrows left in one of them, and Kate felt a moment's irritation at Frank. _Did he break one? What the hell?_

"Princess." Her hand was so warm, so firm on Kate's elbow. "I don't trust him, he's hiding something. The way you are right now, I don't trust him around you-- hell, I'm not sure I trust him around your _bow_ right now, and I worry about you, Kate."

"Hrmph," Kate said, only really giving it half her attention. "You're just jealous."

The silence at her side was a relief, it meant Kate could concentrate all her bewilderment on the arrows in the stump. 

"So what if I am?" America said, and Kate nearly groaned. Now? All those month of heated glances and lingering touches on Kate's arm (and fingers, and knee, and shoulder), and bringing her a bow, and being her literal getaway vehicle at the Met Gala, all of that and now, _now_ America though it was the right time to... to... do... _that_.

"Shhh," Kate said, and walked up to the target. The arrows were dead center; one a perfect bulls-eye. The other, well. The other arrow ought to have been impossible, but it was there, plain as day, split directly in half by the arrow inside it. It was impossible. It defied logic and physics and the Mythbusters alike. It was _exquisite_. 

 

"Don't worry, America," she said, and she now she knew what her own voice sounded like filled with awe. It came out disturbingly breathy, kind of girly still. "I know what his secret is."

"You do?" That did not seem to be half as reassuring to America as it was meant to be, but Kate didn't have time to deal with it now. She was too busy drawing her fingers lightly up the shafts of the two arrows and thinking.

"I do. Don't you see?" She tapped the two shafts. "America, don't you? I can't do this, no one can do this, but he did this. Don't you see _him?_ Take off that stupid scruffy beard, add a little leather and tactical fabric... America, Frank Barney is _Hawkeye._ " 

_Hawkeye’d make that shot._ She could hear his voice in her memory, tossing it out in that fucking offhanded manner that left her no room to argue back.

“He’s not dead,” she said, rolling it around on her tongue before letting the sentence out, trying to get the feel of it, let the new reality settle. _He's in trouble. Hell, he’s on the lam. What’s he doing here? Why would he invite_ me _here?_ "And I think he needs me."

"Oh." America said. 

That was it: "Oh." 

Kate looked over at her-- well, she tried. The flash of light blinded her, as America punched her way out of the clearing, the situation-- and the entire dimension.

 

**Four**

 

“So it’s come to this? You just pick the first person who walks in off the streets and try to throw them at us?” 

Tony Stark’s voice was probably carrying well beyond the office itself, even though he wasn’t shouting. He was… distinctly _not_ shouting. He was, in fact, enunciating very clearly, as if to a somewhat slow child or a tech support person on a bad connection.

“Well, Stark, if you hadn’t run off several of my best agents in succession and weren't working Agent Hand's last nerve, we wouldn’t be in this position,” Fury drawled, and Stark looked from him to Phil, lifting an eyebrow as if to ask _are you going to take that from him?_

Phil managed to keep a straight face, and keep himself still as Lucky waiting for a rabbit to appear. He _felt_ more like one of his hens, if he was being perfectly honest. The time between Fury ambushing him with the job offer to this meeting in Stark’s private office in Avengers Tower had been very brief. At least it _felt_ very brief to Phil, like he’d been blown all the way across Manhattan on a stiff wind, barely keeping himself upright.

There had been no time at all to process the implications, to do more than squeak “I’ll think about it” as Fury pushed him out the door. 

Phil might have argued more, he might have felt more secure on his feet, if he hadn't only just found out Fury was Marcus Johnson and Marcus was alive. If he'd had time to _plan_ for this contingency-- and if he weren't desperately trying to avoid saying or doing anything that would trigger Marcus's suspicions just before heading straight for the former team-- and former home-- of the man whose name he was trying to clear. He'd always been friendly with Melinda May, but he and Marcus had practically lived under each others' skins for a short time. He'd never been good at fooling Marcus-- hadn't usually tried, after that thing with the goat-- and even before he went one-eyed, Marcus's gimlet stare could break Phil where the combined efforts of a dozen insurgents hadn't been able to.

 _Thank god for eighteen years and Doc Halliday to practice on,_ Phil thought. _And whatever the hell bug up Marcus's butt has him so worried he's not seeing straight._

The drive over, just the two of them in Fury’s own SHIELD-issued SUV, had been filled with a thousand and one details: security, pay, Avengers vital stats, nearest best coffee shop, that Phil would take out and replay in his head, as best he could when his higher reasoning powers had stopped being entirely occupied with survival. 

Maybe he'd eventually figure out _how_ he had gotten into this mess in the first place, where he'd gone crazy enough to walk into Avengers Tower-- home of an actual, living, compiling, Turing-test obliterating, artificial intelligence-- under his own power, with two different bugs on his person. Bringing them through SHIELD, well, that was one thing. Pitting them against JARVIS, at least the JARVIS of Clint’s stories? Another entirely.

Yet here he was and no one had yanked him against a wall and arrested him. Maybe Skye had managed to get the bugs to shut down-- if that was a thing that could be done. Or maybe JARVIS somehow hadn't spotted them, which led to all kinds of worried about just how good Ian Quinn's smuggled tech was. It beat the other alternative, though, which was that either JARVIS or Fury, or both, knew about the bugs, and were waiting for some unspecified future time to use that knowledge against him.

However it had happened, he was in Tony Stark’s inner sanctum and listening to the man rant for maybe the second time in his life. He didn’t think Stark remembered him from the one time they met, long years ago when he’d first remembered he still actually _owned_ a private island on the Jersey shore, much less a power plant and experimental hydroelectric project to go with it. He’d come to North Bar and stripped Phil to the bone, squeezing until all the information was out of him, then he’d let Phil go. Stark then had been young, brash, twitchy.

Stark now was middle-aged and twitchy but not, Phil thought as he watched the man pace, hands diving into the pockets of his gray pinstripe briefly before being pulled out to gesticulate, not brash. Though he wanted everyone to think he was. Best to get his true measure quickly in case he lost his mind and said "yes" to Fury's request, given that Phil himself had developed a sudden and acute lack of ability to say no to Director Nicholas Fury (né Marcus Johnson) of SHIELD.

Of all the bad habits to pick back up, this pretty much topped the list. Why the _hell_ was he still here, not on his way back to his chickens and his co-conspirators? Was Clint even now yelling at him frantically to get the _fuck_ out? 

(But how to do that without arousing Fury's suspicions? And just think… sooner or later, all the information would come to him if he were here.)

“It’s not like he’s a complete stranger or has a light resumé, Stark. As you should know; Stark Industries is his current employer.”

“He’s what?” Tony pulled up short and turned to stare at Phil, like he was trying to find his serial number. “Why would I know that? Why would you do that? Where do you work anyway, Mr… um…”

“Coulson,” Phil supplied.

“Coulson. Where do you work?”

“I’m the Keeper of North Bar,” he said mildly, and waited to see if there would be any recognition at all on Tony’s face. Surprisingly, there was. 

“Oh, wait, the site manager who keeps chickens. Right, no wonder you look familiar,” he waved idly and turned back to Fury. “I can’t believe you. Shame on you, not telling Pepper you’re trying to steal Phil Coulson out from under her. She doesn’t know, right? Pepper can’t know about this, she’d have eviscerated you by now.” 

His tone rose slightly at the end of the speech, and Phil found himself shuffling nervously. He hadn't exactly planned on his current employer finding out about this little interlude. 

“Of course Pepper knows about this, Pepper is listed on his reference sheet, Tony,” Pepper Potts said as she walked into the room. Phil stood to greet her, wiping one hand on his pants leg before holding it out. _No going back now._ She gripped it, squeezing lightly, and smiled at him at the same time, the kind of bright, genuine smile that had nearly done for him the first time they’d met, back when she was new and trying to get a handle on Stark’s many properties.

She’d been young then, out of her depth and determined not to show it, trusting long legs and a killer smile to keep him off balance until she could get his measure. It was her mind he’d enjoyed, though the view had its advantages. Pepper’d kept the legs, kept the smile, but each time he met her that brilliant quality she had of managing people seemed to have expanded itself into wider and wider circles, and she thrived under it.

Mostly.

No time to think too hard about Pepper now, beyond a “you look as lovely as ever” to her, which make Stark growl and preen at the same time. Pepper twinkled as she replied.

“You look good, Phil. I love the suit." (It was the same suit he'd worn to the last four yearly site manager reviews, and she knew it.)

“Wait,” Tony said, breaking into their mutual admiration society, “Pep, my heart, you gave him a reference for this? You _knew_ Fury was trying to steal one of my employees from me?”

Phil would have bristled at that had he not realized that Tony cared far more about the form than the substance of the complaint. It would be useless to point out that the man hardly remembered North Bar, its mansion, and its hydroelectric project existed, much less its keeper.

“Of course not, Tony. If I had, I’m not sure whether I would have intervened or encouraged this. Phil asked me to be a reference for him when he joined the Search and Rescue squad in the township. How’s that going, anyway, Phil?”

“Quiet now that the vacationers have gone home,” he allowed, and smiled back at her. “Very little to wrangle these days besides the chickens.”

“Which is why you decided to come to New York and wrangle superheroes?” she asked. Fury had stepped back, letting her control the situation. Phil couldn’t fault him for it, even if he felt a little like he was being left in the wilderness to fend for himself with nothing but a spork and a compass. Tony Stark could bluster a good game, but Pepper was going to be the toughest sell. _But I don't_ want _to sell anything to her. Do I?_

“Honestly, I came for an informational interview, Ms. Potts. I wasn’t expecting to get an offer of employment from SHIELD, let alone this one. I would, of course, have updated you on my job search before I truly started one.”

“And yet, here we are,” she said. Phil shrugged, let himself smile.

“Maybe,” he said, and she raised an eyebrow.

“Maybe?” she repeated, and looked from Fury to Stark and back to him.

“Maybe we don’t want him,” Stark clarified, and Fury snorted.

“Maybe he doesn’t want _you_ , Stark,” he said. Tony turned to stare at him, like he'd caught Phil speaking in Basque all of a sudden. Phil folded his hands in front of himself and rocked on his heels, looking pleasant.

It worked as well as it had way back when he and Marcus Johnson had found themselves temporarily mislaid in Kismaayo. Which was to say it got the attention off him and back on the battle already in progress.

Mostly. As Stark and Fury went back to their sniping, Pepper moved closer to him and handed him a glass of water.

“What’s the 'maybe,' Phil?” she asked quietly, and Phil sighed and looked her in the eye.

“They’re the Avengers, Ms. Potts.”

“Yes, and?”

“Superheroes.”

She nodded. 

“In a slightly different league from your chickens?”

He thought of Clint. Cradling a dying hen. Curled up in his bed. Eyes worried and smile brazen as he saw Phil off that morning. It seemed like eons ago, now. _Is he listening, or have they gone dark?_

“What do you think?” he asked Pepper, still in that determinedly pleasant voice. _Because hell if I know anymore._

She looked him over for a long moment as Stark yelled at Fury in a corner. Half of it was unintelligible, but he could decipher occasional phrases like _practical joke_ and _don’t trust us_ and _stealing my best personnel_ and _after I saved your spy agency for you, you ungrateful son of a bitch._

“I’ll be honest, Phil,” Pepper said quietly. “As much as you’ve always impressed me-- and you have-- this worries me. Tony’s being obnoxious about it but he’s not wrong, even if he’s not right for the reasons he thinks he is. Keeper of North Bar isn’t exactly easy-- I imagine he thinks all you do is wander around that damn mansion all day. _I_ know you spend half your time talking down the locals, or the Coast Guard, Interior-- I’ve seen the reports. You're more efficient than three-quarters of our site managers and none of our researchers have _ever_ had a problem with you-- well, apart from the iPod incident.”

They both winced at the memory of the iPod incident.

“But my god, Phil, these people?” She waved her hand around at them, “they’re a different _world_. They’ve just suffered a… a loss… with Hawkeye… disappearing. They don’t trust SHIELD, and most days I don’t either. SHIELD doesn’t trust them. A liaison that’s not known to anyone in either organization except Director Fury and myself? Do you really think you can handle them?”

Phil smiled down at his water, imagining Clint's voice in his head laughing at him. “You certainly handle _one_ superhero well.” He let himself look back up at her through his eyelashes. 

“That’s not quite the problem I expected,” he said, and she raised an eyebrow. “I was expecting something more along the lines of ‘do you think you can keep up with them in the field,’” he clarified, and Pepper laughed.

“Oh dear, what has Fury been telling you? No, gosh, you’d stay back here, or in a van, like Agent Hand does.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t." _Used to being on the front lines_ Clint had said, of them both, and Phil acknowledged the truth of it. "That isn’t any way to gain anyone’s respect or trust, soldier or superhero.” 

“Do you think you can gain their respect?” she asked, and he gave her what he hoped was a critical look and not a dyspeptic one. He thought of Clint standing next to him holding the hen in the bleeding cone, the two of them hip-deep in salt marsh as he showed Clint the lines that ran back to the power plant. Shoulders brushing as they made dinner.

“Did I gain yours?” he responded. 

“You know you did, Phil, that’s not the question.”

“It's part of the answer, though. Stark looks to you, Ms. Potts. The others may not take all their cues off Stark, but they must trust him with this, or they’d be here. I already have Director Fury’s respect. It’s yours I need. For this position. If I’m going to accept it.” 

Pepper Potts could see right through him, he was quite sure of that. She knew that it was bravado to talk about accepting a position the Avengers hadn’t acceded to-- that Stark was still blustering about less than twenty feet away. But she let him get away with it, and that was how he knew he’d win this round. He was the answer to a problem that had been a thorn in her side for weeks, and it was so inflamed now she’d do almost anything to get it out. 

He was far from the worst person in the world for the position, because he represented a known entity to her and to Fury both. One that was equally distant and equally close to each of them.

_And they're all so desperate for a way out, before they blow each other up. That'd buy anyone crazy enough to say yes some grace._

“Do you _want_ to say yes?” she asked him after a silence.

“God no,” he said honestly, and knew she heard that in his voice. _No, I want my chickens, and Lucky, and Clint in my bed, and mornings watching the sun rise across the dunes, with coffee in my hand._

“Then why are you here?”

“It’s not the kind of request it’s easy to say no to.” (Without getting myself into even worse trouble.)

She nodded.

“All right,” she said, more loudly this time. Stark and Fury both turned to look at her. She smiled benignly on them both. “I think this will work out well, although you _owe_ us, Director.”

“Wait, Pep? We’re _taking_ him?” Tony asked, looking between them.

“We already employ him, Tony, and with the security checks necessary to have anything at all to do with Project Pequod, you can bet I trust him. Or what would you suggest?”

He was trying to come up with something, Phil could tell. His mouth opened and shut a couple of times before he visibly gave up, and threw his hands up.

“Fine. If you want him? Fine. Just…” he glared at Phil, “try and keep yourself from getting hurt.”

Phil brightened his smile for a moment in assent, which made Stark glare further and Fury turn to watch him skeptically.

“Fine,” Fury rumbled. “That’s settled.”

“It’s not,” Phil said, cheerfully, and waited.

“Isn’t it?”

“Who’s taking evenings and weekends?” he asked, tossing it off as half a joke. Stark clearly took it that way; he started laughing. He was morally certain that Clint, if he was still listening, was laughing just as hard. But Clint… Clint knew him by now. Pepper certainly did, she just snorted under her breath. It was a last way out, a last chance to get them to say no for him. And a chance to salvage things if they said yes. In fact, if he worked it just right, this might yet turn out not to be a complete disaster.

“This is kind of a round the clock gig, Coulson,” Stark said, and Fury just watched Phil.

“Then I don’t want it.” And god, if they didn’t think he could out-bluff them any day of the week, they hadn’t dealt with the Long Beach Island Shoreline Preservation Society in a bad mood.

“Why not?” Pepper asked quietly, not that she needed to be louder-- Stark had gone silent. Phil counted that as a win; he’d made the man pay attention, at least.

“My current employer is Stark Industries, and it wouldn’t be responsible of me to leave that position before they’d found someone who can take care of North Bar,” he said, feeling his way through the argument slowly. He was pleasantly surprised to find the reasons there in his mind waiting for him when he went to look for them. _I haven't lost the ability to leap off a cliff buoyed up only by my capacity for cheerful bullshit._ If he was honest with himself, the exhilaration was something he hadn’t felt in too long. (Outside of the night previous, in his bed.) 

“That’s our problem,” Stark told him, and Phil shrugged.

“And you would be my problem, which means North Bar remains mine. You need another Keeper, _now_ , but you also need me to train them in. And even if you didn’t? I would still insist on rotating off duty. No one’s any good when they don’t have time to stand down once in a while.” _And I will probably throttle somebody if I don't get home to Clint, with those condoms, at some point. Or if I have to organize that operation from here._

The duty rotation argument was really directed at Fury, and he gave a brief nod.

“Agent Hand could continue to fill in when you’re off duty,” he conceded, and Tony made a sour face.

“I thought she was trying to get rid of us.”

“She’ll live, as will we all,” Fury muttered back. Phil filed that exchange in the back of his mind to take out and examine later, and reminded himself that Fury _owed_ him a lot more in the way of explanation. How the hell had they all come so far down this path?

... Pepper was asking him if he had any recommendations.

Phil shrugged as if it took some actual thinking about, held his breath, and hoped Clint had put together a convincing set of background documentation for Frank Barney, or that Skye could fill in on the fly.

“My cousin,” he said. “He’s been staying on North Bar with me. He’d do well. He knows the area, he knows some of the locals, and he’s _great_ with boats.”

“He’d need a security check,” Stark pointed out, and Phil kept his face bland as he gave a nod that he hoped conveyed _no shit, Sherlock_ in as polite a manner as possible.

“We already started one, and he's passed the first set of surface checks,” Fury rumbled, and Phil _did_ blink at that. Fury gave him the ghost of a smile.

“What do you people take SHIELD for anyway? We are, still, an intelligence agency.”

Phil thought he was profoundly glad that whatever checks had been run on Frank Barney, he hadn’t known about them at the time. He was going to have to learn all about Frank, and his background and family, and fairly quickly too, before he got shocked like this again. Fainting in front of your prospective employers was never a good start to a professional relationship.

 

**Five**

 

The caretaker's cottage at North Bar still had an actual landline phone. Well, an actual under-the-bay-line phone. In a concession to modernity, it was the cordless kind with its own cradle, and it had currently just stopped ringing. The revoltingly pleasant voiceover at the start of the voicemail was playing, echoing its top-note-heavy way through the empty kitchen.

Kate could hear it from the porch, as she sat there curled up with the one-eyed mutt, waiting in the twilight for Frank Barney-- for _Hawkeye_ to get home. It was cold enough at night now that the fly population had dwindled to nearly nothing, but one big fat fellow was buzzing around her, knocking at her ankles, wrists, cheek. She whapped it away impatiently.

She didn’t have a clue what she was going to say when he got there, but she was a clever girl most days. She’d figure it out-- hopefully at least a second _before_ words started gushing from her mouth. Then, too, it’d depend on whether his aggravating cousin was with him.

After all, if Hawkeye’s cousin didn’t know he was Hawkeye, then much as she wanted to see the look on Phil’s face when he found out, it wasn-- Kate’s train derailed mid-thought.

Because of course, if Frank Barney wasn’t Frank Barney at all but Clint Barton, who was to say he was really Phil Coulson’s cousin?

And if he wasn’t Phil Coulson’s cousin, why would Phil _say_ he was unless he was trying to protect Hawkeye and _oh, fuck, that makes way too much sense. Unless he was trying to protect Hawkeye and I went and fangirled in front of them all and tried to start a fight with Hawkeye’s friend and why am I even here?_

_Besides maybe that Hawkeye thinks I’m an idiot who needs watching before I blow his cover._

_Which makes him, Coulson, and America who all now think I’m blind, stupid, and jerky. And pretty much the rest of the island, honestly._

Kate put her head down in her arms and contemplated dying of mortification.

All thoughts of helping Hawkeye clear his name-- and if she was honest with herself, she’d been imagining them in minute detail ever since she’d seen the double-arrow-- dried up like dew at mid-day. He already _had_ help, what did he need her for?

She should go. 

She should _really_ go. 

She should pretend she was never here and she didn’t know, and then she should lock herself in the big room at the top of the Trashcan and never come out again.

"... message at the beep," the announcement finally ended, and there was silence for a half moment.

"Hey, Frank, it's Phil. I expect you're still out with S-- your friend, so I'll leave this on the cottage phone and... well, and text her, I guess. So, um, there's... news. Lots of news. The interview went... well, I walked out of it with a job-- you’ll never guess where. I can’t talk about it yet, but it means I'm not coming home tonight. In fact, um, not for about a week. The job’s live-in, so I’ll be in New York on weekdays-- I’ve got a room in the tower. I'll spend weekends at home with you and Lucky. 

“Clearly I can't be Keeper anymore, at least not full-time. But Ms. Potts agreed to make _you_ Keeper, at least provisionally. I know, I know, but you're more than up to it, and Lucky'll help, and our friend. 

“So-- gah, hope I have enough time left-- here's the least you need to know right now. A representative’ll be out in a couple days to get my things and send some stuff back. They'll get you settled with paperwork and training manuals, and I'll be back Friday night or Saturday to sort things out. If you need help go to Lucky's Dock, like we talked about. Don’t try to do this alone. Please, I know you don't like help but you're going to need it. Look... I, um... I... there's the warning beep, I better wra--."

 _Beeeeeeep_ said the machine, and Kate snorted. 

\----

To be continued....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time (posts Sept. 21): Meet the Avengers, Nick explains himself further, Phil explains himself further, and Clint has a lot of 'splaining to do. 
> 
> Today's [tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/96925210691/washed-ashore-chapter-11-lee-shore-kathar) includes the real-life inspiration for the Outrageous Egg, and also some spoilery research links for upcoming chapters.  
> On that note, we go to a one-week hiatus, to allow me to finish [Two-Man Rule's](http://archiveofourown.org/series/61710) finale "Recovery" with Faeleverte, and to build the buffer back up a little. 
> 
> We'll be back Sept 21, I'll post teasers in the meantime, and since I don't say so enough, I love everyone in this bar. Your comments fill me with glee. Sometimes sadistic glee, yes, but definitely glee. And when I see washed ashore tags on tumblr, I usually end up sitting there blushing for fifteen minutes or so. (Especially the nsfw one, yow. And you know who you are.)


	12. Anchors Aweigh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meet the Avengers! Nick and Phil question each other's motives, and the North Bar team regroups.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: Pls chk msgs and feed chkns.

**One**

“I’m the last person to say anything against helping out an old war buddy,” Steve grumbled, his arms crossed and a scowl like a constipated koala bear on his face, and Natasha burst out laughing.

“Nat,” he said. 

She put her head down on her hands and sniggered, letting the tension wash out of her shoulders as they quaked. 

“Nat--” Steve’s hands were on his hips now, and she didn’t dare look up, because she had a reputation to maintain, and rolling around on the floor cackling would definitely put a dent in it.

Not even Clint had gotten to see her do that.

Often.

Natasha found her laughter trailing off into a kind of wistful smile, and put it away quickly. Steve was still waiting for her when she looked up, ruining the view out the ceiling-to-floor windows behind him. He’d gone from stopped-up marsupial back to frustrated supersoldier, which was a relief. 

Evening was draining color from the sky, seeping it into the streets in the pinpoint neon winking on below. She had always felt that twilight was properly her time of day; the way the city changed from work to evening clothes gave her freedom to slip in and out of roles and buildings and lives like a shadow. 

“No,” she said when she finally pulled herself all the way together, “that's true. You saying anything like that would be rank hypocrisy, and you know it.” She arched an eyebrow at him and stood, wandering over to the end table to flick over the holographic display again, lingering on the newly-minted Agent Coulson’s extremely sparse profile.

Tony had wandered into the dining room just at the end of dinner, looking like a stunned ferret, and told them all that they were getting a new SHIELD liaison in the place of Victoria Hand. Well, mostly in place of her. Split custody, or something like that. He’d been greeted all around with shrugs, since everyone except Sam was used to the comings and goings of liaisons now. Hand had lasted longer than any of the others. Then he’d explained that the new liaison wasn’t really a SHIELD employee-- well, he was now, but up until a few hours ago he’d been employed by Stark Industries.

“As what?” Sam had asked.

“A hermit,” Tony had said, and Bruce spit out a mouthful of soup.

It had all devolved from there.

“It’s not the same,” Steve replied. “You know it’s not the same. I’m not… I didn't throw someone who’s been mostly a hermit for the past decade and a _half_ right straight into a job where he has to wrangle a bunch of crazy egos with conflicting needs. And then deal with us on top of it.”

“No, you certainly didn't do that. Sam wasn't a hermit, and he fought in a different war. But those are close to the only points of difference. He's done fairly well wrangling our crazy egos. I'm not honestly sure why you're not considering it with other old war buddies.” She said it quietly enough, but she might as well have yelled, since Steve stepped back like she’d slapped him. (Like she’d ever slap him-- if she ever felt the urge, there would be so many more efficient things she could do.)

“Nat-- that’s not even… that’s a horrible idea. And it’s not the point right now. You’re just trying to change the subject. We’re getting off that one right now, and back on Agent Coulson. We were just getting used to Agent Hand, and now this? I don’t trust it, I don’t trust whatever Fury’s up to.”

“You and Victoria Hand get along like oil and a lit match. And to be fair, you never have entirely trusted Fury,” Natasha said, wandering over and sliding an arm through his elbow, easing his arms down from their desperate link. 

That was the irony about their relationship, that Steve had never trusted Fury, but Fury had trusted Steve when the Winter Soldier tried to assassinate him. Steve who Fury was trusting now, to look at it another way, with an old friend who'd been off the radar for fifteen years. “We don’t know a lot about his history with this Coulson, granted, but no-one sends a subpar soldier on detached black ops with SHIELD, Steve.” She knew more than she was going to bother to mention, since a brief phone call to Melinda May-- mostly to set up a lunch date as an excuse for gossip-- had produced one very pertinent word: Orlat.

Given that Orlat was also May’s excuse for staying away from the baked brie at parties, that SHIELD’s official files officially were so adverse to any mention of the place that she was pretty sure there were several maps with it whited out or crosshatched over, and it probably had two entire pages in the SHIELD burn book, Natasha paid more than a little heed to the name.

“Can you find out more?” He was turning those stupid hurt puppy eyes on her now, and Natasha was just done. Yes, of course, and did he even need to ask? Did he honestly, after all this time, think that she didn’t realize that Fury had hidden agendas stuffed inside his hidden agendas, even and probably most especially in this? How would she have survived as a spy if she took these things at face value? But two things were giving her pause, here.

The first was that Director Fury would be the last person to jeopardize SHIELD’s standing with the Avengers right now. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it in at least partial good faith.

The second was that Phil Coulson had already passed the Pepper Check.

“By that, do you mean can I take Pepper out for coffee and find out what she knows?” she said, by way of reminding Steve of that. He had the grace to wince.

“Yeah, yeah. I could ask, I guess, but…”

“But she scares you, Captain Rogers?” She peeked out at him from under her eyelashes as she did, letting herself fall into the rhythms of Steve-baiting, and Steve huffed out a reluctant little laugh. 

“Does not, Nat. She’s a classy gal.” Because going all aw-shucks was his way of teasing back; Natasha’s smile got a little more genuine. “Look, can you take this Coulson guy around to meet Sam and Bruce and everyone? I’ve got an, ah… I’ve got someplace I need to be soon. Poker night.”

That would be in Harlem, at Sam’s place, and even after their previous conversation, Steve was still pretending she had no idea who else was at “poker night.” Natasha gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, just to complete the defusing of his temper, and nodded. As she slipped away, the door creaked open. She retreated to a convenient corner just as Pepper Potts walked in, followed by a man in a suit.

That was her first impression of him, really. Mostly just “man in a suit.” That was followed by “distinguished-looking, balding man in a dapper suit” and then edited to “dangerously normal-looking man in a dapper suit trying to appear completely innocuous while meeting Captain America.” He certainly had given her no more than a single glance.

“Captain Rogers, Phil Coulson, your new SHIELD liaison,” Pepper said, gesturing from one to the other. “Steve, this is Phil. I’ve known him long enough to consider him a friend, although I’m not sure how he feels about it. I’m going to leave you all for a moment; I’ve got to make sure Tony hasn’t… forgotten… to get Phil’s suite set up.”

She meant “done something horrible only he’ll find funny,” but that didn’t need saying. She slipped out as the man in the suit stepped forward. The suit was blue pinstripe, the dangerously normal face had crooked nose and a set of twinkling eyes that reminded her, for a brief burning moment, of Clint, and Natasha bit her lip, waiting to see what he would do next.

“I, um, Captain Rogers, sir.” Mr.-- Agent-- Coulson gulped audibly as he started to hold out his hand. It paused and quivered as if he was contemplating wiping it on his trousers, then started forward again. Steve concealed a smile, with as little success as usually attended his efforts in that direction, and shook. Natasha hid her own amusement considerably better, but she _was_ amused. Watching Steve disconcert normally competent men was always funny.

“Agent Coulson,” he said instead. “I’m afraid I have to be across town soon, so I can’t take you around like I’d like, but I’m glad to meet you. Director Fury tells me you two served together in the Gulf and the Balkans?”

“More or less,” Coulson agreed, pulling himself back together with an effort and transparently trying to avoid responding like an avid ten-year old. It was adorable. “He was a SHIELD liaison to the troops at the time.” 

Natasha recognized a cover story when she heard one, and wondered if Steve did too. His time at SHIELD had been short, if memorable there at the end, but she didn't know if he'd ever picked up on SHIELD-standard codes for "so far above your clearance that as far as you’re concerned it’s just a weather balloon.”

“And you were?” Steve asked.

“75th Rangers, sir, third battalion. I was in until ‘97.”

“Jesus.”

“No, sir, we left the walking on water to the SEALS. Far too flashy for us.”

That surprised a laugh out of Steve, and a pleased nod.

“It’s good to know some things never change,” he said as he turned to head for the door. “The Cubs still can’t get to the postseason, rent’s too high in New York, and the Army and Navy don’t get along. Nice pin, by the way. Very patriotic. Nat’ll show you around.”

He left Coulson gaping like a fish, one hand fluttering over the shield pin tacking town his tie, and Natasha with lips pursed tight against her own laughter. The laugh caught in her throat a little, though, as she watched Coulson pull himself back together and dart a distinctly _assessing_ look in the direction Steve had exited. It lasted half a second before he was back to unprepossessing and mild.

She sidled over to him, coming up against his blind side, and held out her hand.

He turned as if he hadn’t noticed she was there, but she’d seen the minute tensing in his shoulders as she approached.

“Yes, he read your file,” she told him, and his eyes smiled at her-- just his eyes. Neat trick.

“Ms. Romanov,” he said. “It’s a pleasure. I admired your work in Budapest extremely.” _And I read your file_ , went unsaid. 

“I think the pleasure may well be mutual,” she told him, and that was the honest truth, for once. “Shall we meet the others?”

**Two**

The evening sun was in their eyes, turning the water red, as Clint and Skye slipped down into Lola and cast off, motoring away towards the green and gold blob of North Bar, squat against the surf. Neither of them had talked much as they did last errands in town and grabbed dinner for the evening from the Blue Peter. They passed as quickly as they could (without looking like long-distance competitive walkers) down to the docks. 

Phil's text message to Skye was the only thing they had to prove he'd survived Avengers Tower alive, and it was too cryptic to be reassuring. 

_Got a job. Staying in town. Pls tell F to check msgs and feed chkns._

The message had set Skye's pocket buzzing while they were still sitting in her van, surrounded by half-drunk cups of cold coffee and half-eaten pastries. And they hadn't talked for at least an hour, both of them just staring at the laptop, for all the good it would do them, while they waited for some sign from Phil. Clint had spent the time trying to figure out what was going through Skye's mind, because it was highly preferable to examining all of the nightmare scenarios popping up to say hello in his brain, ever since they’d broken off all communication with Phil.

There'd been no choice, of course, not without risking his safety. She'd _had_ to send the signals that disconnected the two little bugs Phil was carrying. Having him walk into Avengers Tower with either of those live and transmitting would have been like running up to JARVIS and hitting with him a (virtual) stick, then hoping you could (virtually) run away faster than he could (virtually) follow. (Hint: you couldn't.)

The trojan lighthouse she'd shut down entirely-- there was no finding out what it had or hadn't been able to capture from SHIELD's servers until she was able to get her hands on it-- if she ever did. Skye'd sent the tie pin bug into listening mode only. Even that, Clint thought, was something of a risk, but there wasn't anything they could do about it. Quinn and his people-- whoever they were-- had left some nice tech in the crates, but it wasn't Tony Stark levels. Whoever'd made the damned thing hadn't thought to leave a way to disable it remotely.

JARVIS could certainly track down passive listening devices, but he wasn't infallible. Back when SHIELD had first been working with Tony, Felix Blake had gotten at least a few bugs past him. Clint, Skye, and Phil were banking on Quinn having built his own devices well enough to pass undetected at places like SHIELD, or the NSA, or Stark Industries. Skye suspected he'd been using them already; it was a matter of finding out just how good Quinn's people really were.

Finding out they sucked would mean Phil getting caught, so he couldn't really hope for that. However, finding out they really _were_ that good had a lot of scary implications. _Good news, the dogs scenting for you turned and ran. Bad news: they smelled something worse._

Before Skye'd disabled the bugs, they'd managed to hear most of the conversation in the SUV while Fury and Phil traveled to Avengers Tower. That included hearing Fury talking up the Avengers and the liaison position like it was something other than a job where you tried to coax a gang of semi-domesticated mountain lions to eat from your hand. Fury was planning on setting Phil up with a suite in the Tower itself, the one that other agents had used in the past, when late nights were required. And he wanted Phil to start living there, abandoning his old charges, as soon as possible. That night, preferably, and they'd send someone from SHIELD out to North Bar to feed the chickens if they had to, in order to make it happen. (Phil, thank god, had politely declined that, explaining his cousin was perfectly capable of feeding a chicken.) 

"Why so fast?" Phil had asked, and Clint had pointed at the laptop vehemently and yelped:

"What he said!"

"Lots of reasons. Primarily to make it harder for Stark to change his mind. And to get Victoria Hand a break before she, and I quote, 'gives a hands-on demonstration of just exactly where Captain America can shove his opinions’. I’m about one good argument away from a PR disaster and having to do an exit interview with a Level 8, and these are not good things, Cheese. I’ll buy you a toothbrush in the lobby shop, but if you get in, you’re staying in.”

Clint spent the boat ride back to North Bar deliberately _not_ thinking about what that meant. Every time it came back up he repressed a desire to yell at Phil to _come the fuck home already_ and get out of there before he got hurt. At some point reality was going to hit and Clint was going to have a fine time thinking about the irony of the whole thing, that Phil was not coming home to Clint and Lucky and his chickens and his goddamned island. 

Instead, he was probably wandering through what had been Clint's (the team's) living room for the last year, maybe even running a hand over the top of the couch Clint most liked to perch on. (Look, give a couch a flat back and you clearly don't mean people to sit on it _normally_.) That Clint was going to be all alone tonight, curled up with Phil's dog, trying _not_ to think about the condoms he'd bought, while Phil was getting to know his team. Meeting Steve, being bullied by Stark, saying hello to Nat.

 _Oh, Nat'll love him._ Nat had _better_ love him. If Phil could win her over, he had a chance at getting out of there alive.

If he even succeeded in getting past Tony.

"Oh, come on, like Tony Stark is going to agree to this," Skye had scoffed as they listened to Fury and Phil talk in the SUV. "Is he?" She turned to Clint, and he snorted in reply.

"Please. Phil can handle superheroes in his sleep." 

And then he blushed, because, well. _Well._

"Yeah, but--"

"No," Clint had sighed back at her, "Fury wouldn't be taking the gamble if he thought it might fail right at the start. Other gambles, yes. But not on something as delicate as this. He won't risk hurting their relationship even more."

"Hmm," Skye'd said, and fallen silent for a moment, as Fury told Phil to avoid the Daily Perk Cafe in the lobby of Avengers Tower, in favor of the Human Bean down the street. (Clint had to admit he agreed-- the Daily Perk had a high pretension-to-milk foam ratio. If you needed a strong cup of french roast and a cruller, without anyone threatening to frap anything, the Human Bean was the better option.) "Pretty impressive though, right?"

"What is?" Clint had asked, momentarily derailed by memories. He'd spent many an early morning after a hard mission curled up in the ratty leather armchair in the back of the coffee shop, chipped mug in hand, and avoided the entire world for a while. 

"How much you fucked up SHIELD and the Avengers just by jumping out a window," Skye'd said and Clint was _definitely_ not smelling the espresso anymore.

"That was not-- I didn't mean-- this didn't all go to shit on account of _me_ ," he'd spluttered.

"No," Skye had leaned her chin on her arms and looked over at him, where he was still tucked onto her cot, and he felt like the walls of the van were closing in on them. "No, I agree-- you aren't the only reason things went to hell. But I'm thinking that's why someone took you out."

"I was the weak link in the Avengers chain?" he asked, even though he didn't need to. That had always been true.

"More like a stitch in a sweater. Cut you and everything unravels. Okay, I gotta pull the plug now," she'd said, and with a few keystrokes she ended their only connection to Phil.

\----

There was a small figure waiting for them on the dock, nearly a shadow against the evening sky, and she was clutching a bow in both hands, less as if she meant to threaten anyone then as if it were keeping her upright. 

"What's she doing here?" Skye hissed next to him, and sat forward in Lola, gripping her seat with both long-fingered hands. Clint spared a moment to glance over at her, before concentrating on bringing the runabout into dock without scraping her paint job. She looked simultaneously exhausted and keyed-up. He knew she would for a while; both of them were chafing under the same lack of resolution, the same itchy uncertainty. 

They didn't really need _more_ to deal with tonight.

"Not sure," Clint said, but that was a lie. He knew perfectly well what had happened. _Hawkeye'd make that shot._ He'd said it, he'd dared her, he'd practically led her up to the door and opened it for her. Done everything short of shoving her through. Left it open, invited her in, and walked away. Clint had damn well meant to leave the equation laid out for her, and Kate Bishop was too clever not to put two arrows together to make Hawkeye. "Let's find out."

\----

Kate wasn’t sure what precisely she’d expected when Hawkeye came home at last, but being handed a plastic bag as he passed her wasn’t it.

She stood watching him stride down the dock (and come to think of it, how had she missed how familiar that backside was? It was in the New York press on a weekly basis) and blinked. 

“Hey,” said the other waitress from the Blue Peter-- Skye, right. Skye-- and Kate turned to look at her, trying to put away the confusion that was slopped all over her face. Skye wrinkled her nose in something that might have been sympathy or might have been allergies, and jerked her head in the direction of the disappearing Avenger. “Coming?” she asked.

“Yeah…” Kate said, “yeah, right.”

They made it through the dunes in time to see the one-eyed mutt come bounding up, and Clint Barton collapse on one knee and bury his face in dog fur.

“Is… is he… actually?” Kate asked after a moment, watching his shoulders shudder. Skye hitched her satchel more firmly onto her shoulder and seemed to think about before answering.

“Maybe, yeah. But if a guy can’t after a day like he’s had, when can he? And if a guy’s gonna do it, then it makes sense he’d do it while cuddling a dog, right? That’s, like, guy kryptonite, coming home to a dog waiting for them.”

Yeah, Kate could see that, but it was quickly getting a little too personal to watch. Skye must have thought so too, because she shifted on her feet and sighed before starting forward. Her shoes slapped the deck loudly as she did. Giving Hawkeye time to pull himself together, Kate guessed. 

“Hey, Frank, are we gonna feed the chickens first or what?” Skye shouted, and he straightened up and turned, looking over his shoulder at them. 

He looked like he’d just come over a mountain, only to find another one in front of him, probably with a large river in the valley just to make things more interesting. And he was trying to put a brave face on it, like _what’s one more little mountain after all_. Oh, _crap_ , Kate thought, _whatever the hell happened, I don’t belong here._ She shook her head, because if she didn’t belong here, why’d she stayed? And why had Hawkeye handed her a bag full of take-out boxes? She started forward, bow in one hand, bag in the other.

 _Fuckit, I’ll_ make _myself belong here._ She had the length of the deck-- which was both far too short and interminably long-- to figure out what her opening gambit was going to be.

“Hey, you should check your messages, you’ve got one from your cousin,” was what she went with, and then promptly wanted to _die_. _Oh my God that just combined moderately stalkery with slightly threatening and inappropriately casual._

Frank Barn-- Clint Barton-- _Hawkeye_ looked her up and down, something complicated and a little wry on his face, and Kate forgot to breathe for a minute.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Phil got a job with SHIELD. He’s going to be working with the Avengers. Let’s get these bags inside and listen to the message while I get dinner started, then we’ll all go feed the chickens.” He turned and trotted up the steps to the front porch of the cottage, glancing briefly at the empty porch swing that creaked with the breeze, a high, lonely sound in the darkening air. 

Kate and Skye followed obediently and let themselves be ushered into a dark entryway. Clint closed the door behind them, flipped on the light, and added:

“And while we do that, we can work on how the hell we’re going to keep SHIELD from figuring out who I am.”

Skye turned to stare at her, and Kate was probably doing something worth staring at, if the way her face felt like she’d suddenly walked into a spiderweb was any indication.

“Enh?” she said, and Hawkeye gave her a wink, and ducked through a low doorway into the kitchen, where he proceeded to preheat the oven and remove pot pies from various boxes. 

“Huh,” Skye said, and Kate had the feeling she was being processed right down to her elemental bits and built back up. This was a girl whose chief claim on her attention before that had been when she’d had to stop America from punching someone on Kate’s behalf. When he’d stopped America with a hand laid softly on her elbow and a whisper in her ear. _What the hell does she think about me?_ And why the hell… why was she helping Hawkeye? And Phil and….

_What have I got myself into this time?_

“Yeah,” Skye said, when Hawkeye wandered back out after a minute. “Yeah, you’re right. Probably better this way. C’mon, Kate.” 

Hawkeye winked at her, and she found herself following along behind them like a lost chicken looking for feed.

It was one hell of a way to find yourself inducted into a conspiracy.

**Three**

The proverbial hairs on the back of his neck were, at least, in good working order, Phil thought, and then gave a conscious little jump anyway. From Marcus’s-- Fury’s-- snort, he doubted he’d succeeded in deceiving him. 

“Well, I wondered, when I hadn’t seen any security footage of you running away screaming,” Fury said, “if you’d found an alternate exit. Can’t recommend this one, though. It’s a long way down.” 

Phil nodded, and looked over the edge of the railing at the Manhattan traffic stirring sluggishly so far below them.

“Just needed a moment to collect my thoughts.”

“Yeah, I can see that. So tell me, Cheese,” Fury leaned out across the railing next to him, looking over at him with what seemed to be perfectly innocent curiosity. Phil felt pinned like a beetle to a shadow box. “What’s on your mind?”

Phil snorted. 

“You know that perfectly well, Marc-- Director,” he said, amending the end a little too quickly.

“Yeah, well, lay it on me anyway.”

“Why me?”

“Being a hermit all those years turn you stupid, Coulson? Didn’t I spend most of the afternoon answering that very question for you, and May, and my Deputy, and Stark and his CEO, and the rest of the Avengers?”

“You did,” Phil said slowly. “And it was all bullshit.” It was his imagination, it _had_ to be his imagination, but he could nearly hear Clint gasp-- whether in shock or laughter, he couldn’t be sure. (Which was silly, it was his own mind doing it.) 

“All of it?” Fury side-eyed him, but his elbows didn’t leave the railings, and Phil was pleased to see he could still read little hints of his attitude in the varied settings of his scowl. 

“It wasn’t the whole story, anyway. If you really wanted your old colleague from the Ranger days, you could have looked me up any time this last decade, Marcus. You run a spy agency, it’s not like I just wasn’t in your rolodex. And while I appreciate that Ms. Potts was in my corner, that doesn’t negate Mr. Stark or Mr. Rog-- Captain Roger’s-- objections. Honestly, Marcus, I’ve never been a spy. I did a decent job in Army intelligence, and played around in black ops. And then you and I stood around and did shit in Kosovo. For most of the last fifteen years, despite the resume I gave May and Stark, I really have been a hermit. Why the _hell_ do you think I’m the best fit for your motley band of superheroes?”

“Because you’ve been a hermit for the last fifteen years, Phil,” Fury said, and leaned backwards. Phil let him hang on the silence until he was ready to explain. After a long moment, Fury nodded out in the direction of the ocean. “And because a year ago, we finished dealing with a very nasty little HYDRA problem. You remember the hearings?”

Phil did, and the court martials that had followed the loss of the Project Insight helicarriers, drowned deep in their berths beneath the Potomac as the Triskelion fell. The building had sat, an abandoned shell, since that day.

“They were tough on you,” Phil said.

“Deservedly so. HYDRA’d grown within SHIELD, practically since the beginning. Had its tentacles everywhere. Had to burn it out from the inside; lost a lot of good men and women. Found out a lot of good men and women had turned. Crippled SHIELD good-- might have taken it down entirely if Stark hadn’t been such a busybody back during the Chitauri invasion. Him and Rogers, between ‘em they saved SHIELD. I suspect they regret that.” Fury shrugged, and looked back at Phil. “You know all this, it’s why we’re desperate enough to be scraping the bottoms of other agencies’ barrels.”

“And recruiting hermits?”

“Sort of. Tell me, Phil, if you’re HYDRA, do you stop at infiltrating SHIELD?”

Phil figured his snort was reponse enough to that, and sure enough, Fury laughed. It wasn’t a particularly happy laugh.

“Exactly,” he continued. “How much can I actually trust the people I’m recruiting from elsewhere? And how do I know we got every one of those tentacles out of SHIELD, right? So what am I gonna do, when I badly need someone who I can trust, who I know hasn’t been compromised, to keep a very delicate relationship going between me and a set of people who can’t decide whether they’re superheroes, soldiers, mad scientists, or the world’s weirdest rock band?”

“You hire a guy who’s been largely stuck on an island for fifteen years, talking with a scruffy dog and a set of chickens,” Phil said. “Because HYDRA wasn’t going to bother to infiltrate my flock.”

Fury nodded, slowly. 

“That’s one way of putting it,” he allowed. “And I hope you appreciate that I didn’t have to tell you any of this. Could have just blown smoke up your ass.”

Instead, he was making a deliberate ploy for Phil’s sense of loyalty, Phil knew. He was out of practice with Marcus-interpretation, but not _that_ out of practice. The man, even back in Riyadh, had always been playing at least three games at once. (One was chess, another Diplomacy, and the third one was known only to himself-- Phil strongly suspected Mao.)

“I appreciate it,” Phil said, judiciously. The wind was getting chilly, this far up, and he turned his back to the railing and leaned against it, crossing his arms against the chill. Fury turned with him.

“Yeah? Your turn then.”

“My turn?”

“Yeah. Why you, Coulson. Why’d you come waltzing into my parlor now?”

 _Because your house isn’t clean yet,_ he didn’t say. _Because a superhero-- one of these superheros-- trusts me to save him_ he didn’t say. _Because Clint deserves it_ he couldn’t say. The bullshit he’d fed May aside, about restlessness and new beginnings and needing to feel needed again, Phil didn’t know quite what to say. Oh, the bullshit was true, but it wasn’t the heart of it, and Marcus would know goddamn well if he was even a degree off true when he spoke. 

So what should he say? Phil imagined Clint, leaned over Skye’s laptop, hanging off his every word-- if the damned tie pin was still working. If it wasn’t, though, it didn’t change who he owed the answer to. When he spoke, it was to Clint, however much he directed his words at the man standing next to him.

“Because I’m still an adrenaline junkie at heart, and I fell off the wagon,” Phil finally said, and felt in his bones that he’d hit the truth of it at last. From Marcus’s grunt, he’d realized that, as well. Well. He wasn’t the chief spook for nothing.

“Helluva bender you’re about to go on,” Marcus said.

“I guess.”

“Why SHIELD, though? Why saving the world, why not stock cars or sailing to Australia in an open sailboat?”

“I’m a Ranger, Marcus, you know that,” Phil snapped, then settled. “Or I was.” He shrugged. “I need to feel needed.”

“That why the chickens?”

“Fuck you too, Director Fury. I will not have you insulting my chickens, even by implication,” Phil said stiffly, putting on his best prissy officer face, and was rewarded with a full-on laugh from his old friend. The laughter seemed to startle Fury, and Phil wondered just how long it had been since he’d had a chance to let loose at all.

But they were only talking around the issue, and if Phil was still confessing to Clint-- and Phil was-- he owed both men a little more truth. In recompense to the one for letting a fox into the henhouse, in recompense to the other for cracking himself open for Phil.

“When you were so busy bulking SHIELD up and building Project Insight, after the Invasion,” Phil said slowly, “I wonder, do you know how much of Sandy you missed?” Fury glanced over at him, curious and sober now, and shook his head.

“A lot, I imagine.” He said, his eye concentrated on Phil. “Not like we didn’t have the intel, mind, but you’re not wrong-- we were preoccupied.”

Phil nodded.

“LBI is a barrier island,” he said slowly. “An overgrown shoal, really. Also overpopulated, and with far fewer natural protections than it used to have. We were already unsettled from the Chitauri Invasion-- that was like 9/11 gone postal. Everyone had relatives who died or lost everything. Everyone had customers. LBI lives on vacationers, and they didn’t come. It was a rough summer. And then Sandy came, and for a while, LBI didn’t exist anymore. It was just a collection of roofs poking out of the surf.

“North Bar survived better, thanks to a sheltered location in the bay, thanks also to a lot of reclamation work. But I had a working boat, and a duty to help, and it took a _lot_ of help, by a lot of people, to get LBI even vaguely to rights. We hadn’t seen a storm like that in decades. And it felt right. It felt like something I could _do_. Rescuing people, I’m pretty decent at that. Lot of practice. Rebuilding, I can do that. People needed managing, and I’d forgotten how much I liked that.”

Fury was nodding along, not shocked at all, no eyebrows raised at Phil’s estimation of himself. Phil wasn’t prone to exaggerated considerations of his own talents; he knew what he was good at.

“And then the flurry died down, and you’d gotten a taste again, huh? And figured SHIELD was desperate enough not to be picky?”

“Yes,” Phil said, and it was a confession. That his chickens and his island weren’t enough. His odd little collection of friends and acquaintances at Gansett Light, whose houses he’d helped rebuild with his own hands.

They weren’t quite enough.

It wasn’t just the sudden advent of a half-drowned archer into his life; it was that his heart and his brain had finally healed, in the aftermath of the ruin of thousands of peoples’ lives. 

At last, after so many years, it felt good to be needed again.

“Well,” Fury said, breaking into his thoughts and gesturing at the lit windows of the penthouse, where Stark had come in and was moving around, turning towards the balcony now and waving. “You’re probably gonna regret that.”

**Four**

“What can I do for you, young man?” The lady who answered the door was old, ornamental, and quite solid underneath, like the old Victorian she lived in. Between her blue-washed hair and her floral blouse, she even matched the paintwork a little bit. 

“I, um,” Clint gulped, as she watched him, eyes sharp and beady yet behind her trifocals. _Just like Tasha, oh god_. “You’re Doc Halliday, right? Phil said to come to you for help,” he said. _Phil didn’t tell me how old you were though_. He was going to have _words_ with Phil about that one-- assuming he ever got to talk to Phil in private again.

“I am indeed, and you must be Phil’s cousin Frank.” She gestured him inside, and Clint ducked after her into the cool interior. As the old wooden screen door slammed behind him, he tried to bite back the feeling of a trap closing. The shadows lengthened along the faded oriental rug that ran over the floorboards, shifted and skittered as the vines that created them shifted against the windows when the breeze lengthened. Lace curtains billowed in the parlor as they passed. She was leading him directly to the back of the house, and she decanted him into a kitchen done in white and blue like Dutch china, accented with plates of hammered copper.

“That’s what they tell me,” he said, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. She was puttering about with her back to him, filling a paper filter with the absolute best robusta dust Folger’s could provide in their red aluminum tins. He had a brief flashback-- _very_ far back-- to visiting his mother’s great-aunt. If Doc Halliday produced any of those little jelly-filled strawberry candies, he was bookin’ it.

His great-aunt had been terrifying, in her own doddering fashion.

“It’s not Lucky,” she said as she set the carafe in the coffee maker and flipped the switch. “If it were Lucky, you’d either have him here and Phil would have called ahead, or you’d be trying to pull me right back out the door for a house call. So is it the chickens?”

“It’s Phil,” Clint said. “He’s gone to the Tower.” 

She stopped in the act of opening a high cupboard, and turned to stare at him from over the rim of her glasses. _Just like the cuckoo-patterned Dominique that always glares at me when I come for the eggs_. And who was likely to acquire a name, the next time he saw it. Assuming he got out of here alive. 

“The Tower?” she said, raising an eyebrow-- which was a far more Phil-like than hen-like action.

“Avenger’s Tower,” Clint clarified, feeling his face heat, and hoping the coffee would finish soon so that he could wrap his hands around a mug before she realized they were shaking.

“Well good, that makes me feel a very little bit less like we wandered into Gormenghast. Have a cookie.” She laid a plate of fudge-striped shortbread wheels in front of him on the kitchen island. Clint picked one up, wondering if his pinkie was still small enough to fit through the hole in the center. “Do you mean that Phil went to Stark Industries? Surely he’s not in trouble-- can’t imagine him not being in favor with them. No one else could run North Bar the way he has.”

“No, ma’am, not Stark Industries. That’s… that’s _my_ problem. Phil’s gone to Avenger’s Tower because… to… he’s been… SHIELD hired him. To work with the Avengers.”

He looked up at her, expecting any number of reactions, from shock to confusion to disbelief. He did _not_ expect to see resigned frustration riding there in the twist of her mouth and hands on her hips.

“Well darnit,” she said after a while, “I always knew he was too good to last. It’s going to leave me in a real lurch with the Preservation Society, though. I don’t suppose you know Robert’s Rules?” 

“No, ma’am!” Clint said, pushing backwards away from the island. “And he wasn’t… he didn’t _intend_ to take a job there it just… it kind of happened?” She snorted, just as the coffee maker, which had been sputtering and dripping away in the background, gave a dying rattle and ceased production. 

“It just happened,” she said slowly, looking at him, then turned back to the cupboard above the coffee maker and removed two dainty rose-patterned cups. “I suppose I can believe it of him,” she continued as she poured, “though not of much anyone else. And I suppose he sent you here because suddenly you’re the only person keeping North Bar and you’re in over your head, yes?”

Clint shrugged as she set the cup in front of him and sipped her own. She was still watching him with a sharp look. _This is the woman who stayed up all night with Lucky and a flatulent shih tzu_ he reminded himself. 

“Well, Mr. Barney--” she said, and Clint wrapped his hands around his coffee cup, letting the liquid burn his palms through the thin china, took a deep breath, and remembered what it was like to leap off tall buildings.

“Barton,” he corrected her.

“Barton?” She frowned, and he could see her reviewing her previous conversations to figure out where she’d gone wrong. “Frank Barton.”

“ _Clint_ Barton,” he said. Then, feeling awkward, he added: “The Avenger.” 

Doc Halliday put down her cup, put her hands on her hips, and just _looked_ at him. Above the refrigerator, a wall clock with songbirds at the hours ticked quietly along, the hour hand at half-past-Titmouse. It was six ticks by the clock, though it felt like eons, before she stirred.

“Of course you are,” she said. “Phil never did anything by halves.”

“He doesn’t,” Clint agreed, and took a sip of coffee at last, still watching her.

“Hrmph. And when he told you to come to me for help, did he mean you to trust me with that?” she asked him, and picked her coffee back up. 

“He said he trusted you, and you could help,” Clint shrugged, and picked up a cookie, forcing himself into nonchalance. _And I can already see why you think so, babe._ He took a deep breath before continuing. This was the tightrope act, right here. “He also said you were the center of town-- the person you come to t’ find out _anything_. And you like stories. So I figured, best just give it to you straight than try and hide it and fu-- mess things up.”

“Hah, and you also ‘figured’ I couldn’t resist a fugitive superhero, huh?”

Clint laid on his best abashed smile-- and it wasn’t really an act, what with the exasperation she was radiating. He shrugged.

“Kinda hoping,” he said.

“Yes, well.” She gathered herself up and came around the island. “You aren’t wrong, either of you. Bring the cookies and come out to the porch with me.”

Clint followed her, the thin handle of his cup caught between two big fingers, and the plate gripped in his other hand. She took the cookies from him and set them on a little wicker table topped with smoked glass, next to a basket of bromeliads. She sat herself in a rocker, and gestured him into the chair opposite her.

It was a big old wicker chair, styled like a throne with a high lobed back, and so narrow at the base that his ass barely fit between the arms. He settled uncomfortably, hearing it creak, wondering if this was where Phil sat when he came to gossip on her porch, and if he too felt like a musk ox at a tea party. 

“Why did we move?” he asked when they were settled.

“Because you’re right, you’re going to need help,” she said. “And yes, I know everything around town, and I know you sometimes run with that Kate Bishop, and with the girl from California. I’m sure they’re very smart girls, but they aren’t going to establish you in town, and I imagine that’s what you most need right now, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Clint said, a little stunned by how comprehensively she understood the situation, so quickly. Very soon-- far too soon-- representatives of Stark Industries were going to come to vet him and help him get settled, and at least one of them would actually be SHIELD. 

And before that happened, he needed to _be_ Frank Barney in fact, accepted in the community as who he was, unexceptionable or at _least_ tolerated. Phil had kept him away from Doc Halliday before simply because, he said, she saw too much and talked to too many people. Now, he needed that to be his saving grace.

Between himself, Skye, and the somewhat stunned Kate Bishop, he felt fairly comfortable about the visit to North Bar itself. Clint had never been exceptional at deep cover, but he could pull a con when he needed to, and he had good partners in the two young women. They’d set their roles while feeding chickens the night before, and if Kate had fratcheted a little when he’d explained that he primarily needed her _makeup_ , she’d settled quickly when she understood. In fact, by the time he'd left them earlier in the afternoon, bowed over one computer and muttering, he’d begun to feel like she and Skye had taken over control of the whole thing, a feeling that was only intensifying now under Doc Halliday’s gimlet stare.

“Well if I’m to manage that,” she said as she settled back into her rocker and picked up a cookie, “I need to make sure everyone sees you with me. No better way to get started. Now, tell me, you’re going to be useless with the Preservation Society… I assume you’ll be taking over Phil’s spot in the Fire Company, yes?” she paused to look critically at his arms, “Yes. That’s a start, they’re horrible gossips. How are you with children, Mr. Barton?” she asked, and Clint gulped.

Now he saw why she’d put him in the wicker throne; he was trapped, couldn’t get anywhere gracefully, while she took over his life for him. 

_Help,_ he thought vaguely. 

Her talk washed over him in waves, and he struggled to keep his head above water. Faintly, from the house, a Northern Oriole chirped the hour: six o’clock. All’s well.

\----

To be continued....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time:
> 
> The North Bar team is gonna need a montage; shakedown cruises with the Avengers; and Natasha is, after all, a spy.
> 
> Slightly belated, here's tonight's [ tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/98125758831/washed-ashore-chapter-12-anchors-aweigh-kathar), some of the research and images on the damage Sandy did to LBI. Phil is far from hyperbole when he says LBI didn't exist for a little while.
> 
> I'm glad to be back! I've missed you guys, and our chickens and Lucky and all. Recovery is posted [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2321675/chapters/5112122), and writing life should be a little easier now. Posting life, however, is going on hold for yet-one-more week, as I'll be out of town with no internet next weekend. I could easily go off on a tangent about rural broadband access, but am sitting on my hands. Posting will resume on Sunday, October 4.


	13. Shakedown Cruises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They really need a montage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: Never denigrate the chickens. Even by implication.

**One**

“So tell me, Cheese, what’s on your mind?” Nick Fury’s voice sounded hollow, lacking in bass, as it came out of the laptop’s speakers.

Clint sighed, pausing a moment in his work, the poker a heavy weight against his palm. He waited until he heard Phil ask “why me?,” his voice light even with the poor sound quality. Then, he gave the fire one last jab and laid the poker down on the hearth. Fury was talking again, his cadence familiar, his tone somehow bluer than Clint remembered. 

Clint uncurled himself and eased back into Phil’s big leather chair, settling his socked feet on the ottoman. Sitting down felt almost like trespassing. The chair was so heavily identified in his mind with Phil, the wear on its seat might as well have been the very shape and imprint of his ass. Once he was in, however, Clint never wanted to leave; the leather reshaped itself to make space for him, like he was rooted through it into the cottage, down through that into the island itself, and he wondered if the cottage had been built around the chair, each caretaker since being welcomed the same way. 

_This is what happens when you leave me to myself,_ Clint thought, turning his attention back to the conversation being replayed, and taking a moment to watch the flames on the hearth flicker, framed between his big toes. 

The little shield pin and the lighthouse keychain had arrived that morning by special courier, attached to Phil’s tie and his caretaker’s keys, respectively. Phil had included an extensively annotated list of tasks for Clint to be sure to remember to complete and notes on the proper application of permethrin for the chickens. The return of the listening devices had come as a huge relief, the addition of the list something of an apology and warning, but the inclusion of the tie Clint could only see as a promise, and he fought not to pay it any mind while he was being watched.

Which he had been, at that time. The courier had called Clint to come meet him at the quay on Gansett Light for the drop off. It was pouring rain when Clint arrived to meet him and he blessed the chance. He obscured his face under the deep hood of Phil’s yellow slicker and ruffled his beard to full wooliness. (Phil's disdain for the disguising properties of baseball caps still echoed in his head.) In exchange, he brought a duffel bag for Phil, stuffed with pajamas, boxers, shirts, socks, Phil's shaving kit, and copies of _Captain America Reconsidered_ and _Looking for a Ship_. The latter, because he’d found it on Phil’s bedside table, dog-eared and using a tattered gull feather for a marker. The former, because he was still more than a little ticked off at Phil for trying to give him a heart attack.

Skye had packed the duffel at Clint's direction, to make absolutely sure it bore no faint traces of Barton DNA. It was more than likely overkill, but Clint considered it a learning experience for her; the first measures of the dance they’d be doing when someone came to get him processed as Keeper of North Bar. The courier probably _was_ a SHIELD agent, but Clint also knew he'd be seeing possibly-imaginary SHIELD agents around every corner and under every bush for quite some time to come. He’d been vibrating quietly throughout the entire exchange, and when he was through, he and Skye had retreated to her van to listen to the audio from the little pin, while she got started on the chip in the lighthouse.

“It has at least _some_ data,” she'd sighed at last, and just like that Clint’s neck muscles went from greek myth levels of tangled down to merely epic. “But I don’t have time to sort it now, not and get you replacement documents, too. So, shoo. And-- here.” She handed him a usb drive, and he blinked back up at her.

“It’s a copy of the audio from Phil’s pin,” she said, closing his fingers over it. 

They’d finished listening to Phil’s interview with Tony Stark and Pepper Potts during the time it took her to work with the trojan lighthouse. Clint had spent most of that time wavering between wanting to strangle Phil and wanting to reach through the speakers, grab him, and kiss the daylights out of him. _Evenings and weekends off_. He repeated it in his head like he was memorizing the sign and countersign for a mission. Bless Phil. Bless his hairy, steel balls for that. 

“What do you want me to do with it?” Clint asked, rolling the drive in his palm absently. It was such a tiny thing, really, to hold such an awful lot of his world hostage. She shrugged and moved out of her seat, stretching in what little space the van afforded and nearly backhanding him across the temple. 

“Homework. Listen to it tonight, see if it has anything else for us.”

The drive had burnt a hole in his pocket and his brain all day as he set about getting North Bar ready for visitors of a certain kind. Of the thousand and one tasks, most were so mundane they sent his anxiety spiraling upwards: wiping down the entire cottage, feeding the chickens, stowing Quinn's crates in inconspicuous corners of the bunker, doing the daily walk-through of the mansion and straightening slipcovers, texting with Skye and Kate as problems cropped up and were cut down, removing all evidence of the impromptu archery stumps, and what seemed like a million other items that arose as the day went on.

Then he’d gone off to throw himself on Doc Halliday’s frankly terrifying mercy. 

Lucky’d stuck close to him all day, and sat whining at the gate as Clint left for town in the evening. He was sitting there still when Clint returned in the late evening, every limb quivering, and a tiny doggy whine slipped out of him as Clint bent to open the gate. Lucky clearly hadn't eaten all afternoon, given the way he vacuumed up nearly his entire dish of food in one complicated slurp, before adhering to Clint's leg. Lucky paced along behind him like a scruffy golden shadow as he settled the cottage and yard down for the night. 

Along about the time he found himself cuddling Tasha the hen to him as she wriggled and pecked at his arm, Clint realized that he might be procrastinating a bit.

Hence the fire, and the lowball of scotch on the broad arm of the chair, and Lucky at his feet, alternately watching him and tilting his big ears to pick up every last sound of his master's voice as it filtered through the cheap speakers. Clint put down the scotch and dug out the new driver’s license and birth certificate Skye’d presented him with that evening when they met at the Blue Peter, examining them closely. It took the combined efforts of fire, alcohol, dog, and work to keep him from flying out of his skin while listening to Phil and Fury dig into each others' psyches.

“So what am I gonna do,” Fury asked, and Clint concentrated on his rubbing his driver’s license along the edge of the chair's arm, carefully distressing the surface, “when I badly need someone who I can trust, who I know hasn’t been compromised, to keep a very delicate relationship going between me and a set of people who can’t decide whether they’re superheroes, soldiers, mad scientists, or the world’s weirdest rock band?” 

It was the most accurate description of the Avengers Clint had ever heard, and he wasn't sure if what was bubbling up in his throat was laughter or tears. 

He'd had that reaction more than once under Nick Fury. Over the years, Clint had grown very sensitive to it. For instance, there was the debacle in New Mexico, and the way Fury had handled a passel of intergalactic Vikings landing on his shores, as if he'd just been waiting for something like that to happen. 

Between the laughter and the tears at the end of that op, and Fury's reaction, some weird prickling up the back of Clint's neck had told him shit was only _beginning_ to get weird. Which had turned out to be a severe understatement. 

That prickle had saved his ass so many times that his response was now ingrained: every time it happened, he set up another go-bag in another remote location. 

Frank Barney was the product of the prickling in New Mexico, proving that once again it was saving Clint's ass. Frank, conveniently, sported a State of Delaware ID and birth certificate. It meant that Skye was able to hack into the state’s servers and put in a print order, then wander through the appropriate agencies to pick them up herself and still be back for her shift at the Blue Peter in the evening. 

She terrified him a little bit, if he was being honest.

“You hire a guy who’s been largely stuck on an island for fifteen years, talking with a scruffy dog and a set of chickens,” Phil said, and even over the speakers his voice crawled right down Clint's spine to settle in his tailbone. “Because HYDRA wasn’t going to bother to infiltrate my flock.”

The scotch left snail trails along the sides of the glass as Clint tilted it, debating another sip. This side of Phil, the one that kept up with Nick Fury’s twisted mind like it had a copy of the schematics, should have come as a revelation. Instead, it was only a logical extension of the Phil he’d known on North Bar, the Phil who was so far outside of any of the beaten pathways, so wholly unexpected, that he had become the one safe harbor Clint could trust.

“He’s right, you know,” Clint told Lucky, and Lucky raised his head from its spot on his front paws and whined back at him. “Fury, that is. He’s got a point. I mean, he’s _wrong,_ ‘cause Phil’s totally been infiltrated-- not like _that_ \--” (damn those useless condoms) “but you know what I’m saying.”

“Yeah." Fury asked, and for a wild instant Clint thought he was responding to him, "Why you, Coulson. Why’d you come waltzing into my parlor now?”

“Because I needed him to,” Clint answered, before Phil could. He closed his eyes, and listened. His breath came long and deep. A log popped in the fireplace. Lucky stirred, getting slowly to his feet. In the silence on the audio, Clint knew Phil was running through the same answers he was, discarding them each in turn. _It isn’t quite right. It's not_ just _about me._

Come right down to it, Clint realized he was just as curious as Fury was. He leaned forward, hoping the lengthening silence didn't mean that the the damn pin had stopped recording right there. Lucky’s head came down on his lap and settled, and his fingers tangled automatically into the fur to find and rub the warm scalp underneath.

“Because I’m still an adrenaline junkie at heart, and I fell off the wagon,” Phil said at last, and even over the speakers Clint could hear the hush in his voice, like he’d startled himself. 

Like he was a man discovering an uncharted shore in his own mind, uncertain whether-- if he stepped ashore-- he would ever get back to familiar territory.

Wood creaked, the cottage settling in for the night like it always did. Clint tilted his head back towards the sound, not quite looking over his shoulder. He waited for Phil to resolve the uncertainty building in his gut. 

“That why the chickens?” Fury asked, and Phil’s offended snort came clear through the inadequate audio.

“Fuck you too, Director Fury. I will not have you insulting my chickens, even by implication,” he said, and Clint's unease dissolved into laughter. 

“There, you see,” he said to the cottage at large, “he still cares. It’s going to be all right.”

It was. To the extent it was under anyone's control, they would make it be.

 _They_. He'd gotten used to having Skye as part of their little conspiracy, including her in the larger circle of _us_ that surrounded what had been just Clint and Phil. She'd already been drawn in, after all, it had just taken her a while to match trajectories with them. Kate had just kind of _shown up_ and demanded to be kept, and he half wanted to apologize to Phil because maybe he _did_ imprint teenage prodigies. _Two is still just a coincidence, Barton. No need to panic yet._ He kept waiting for himself to freak out about her, but it wasn't happening-- something about having shot her bow, maybe. They had the same itch, under the skin. 

As for the newest satellites to begin gliding into orbit, Clint took no responsibility for those, yet. 

He had more than enough else sitting on his shoulders tonight.

Tomorrow a stranger would wander into the flock, and even now Skye and Kate were huddled in the decrepit utility van completing the preparations for their welcome. Doc Halliday was ordering Clint's short-term future for him from the cracked rotary phone in her her little white Victorian on the quiet side street. Phil was alive and well in Avengers Tower, settling down for the night only a floor or two from where Clint used to sleep.

Meanwhile, Clint had Phil’s true home to keep safe for him, and a long day ahead come morning. He finished listening to Phil’s conversation with Fury while he poked at the fire, scattering the embers until they winked out one by one in solitary beds of ash. He was nearly ready to go to bed when he heard Phil’s voice a final time, pitched as if he were alone somewhere, reassuring himself.

“It's going to be all right. Just a week, and then I will be home. Everything will work itself out-- knock on wood.”

Clint closed his eyes and huffed out a small laugh. Leave it to Phil. In that moment, Clint loved every last inch of him, hairy toes to less-than-hairy head, for providing that last little comfort.

There was a soft scuffling sound over the audio and then:

“If I can _find_ any wood. What the hell? Is there anything that isn’t synthetic up here?”

“On _that_ fine note,” Clint said, and downed the last of the scotch. “I’m headed to bed. Lucky, you wanna come with?”

Lucky did.

 

**Two**

 

Kate sat at her window high in the central tower of the Trashcan and stared out into the night, wondering whether she was actually going to survive the morning.

If she'd had any sense of self-preservation at all (and thanks, Dad, Cousin Emily, Billy, Teddy, America, for the reminder that she didn't), she'd have bowed out. She would be scrolling through yamblr reblogging every picture of the Falcon's butt that Teddy posted; or binge-watching something online; or attempting to cajole Emily into going with her to the Blue Peter; or just lying with her earbuds in, attempting to drown out the sound of her own loneliness. She wouldn't, at any rate, be cold-bloodedly sitting on her window seat, filing her nails, and considering what to wear when conspiring to put one past both Stark Industries and SHIELD. 

_I wish I had my bow. Shooting things, I can handle. That's easy. This? This is..._ not _shooting things. I should have just said no. Why didn't I say no?_

In her defense-- and if it all went to hell, she might _need_ a defense, she’d been distracted by all the chickens.

Hawkeye had not at all been kidding about feeding chickens while plotting, and that was….

Well, she’d had a weird life, lately.

She knew a friend who shapeshifted, all right? And his boyfriend who could sort of do magic. (No "sort of" about it, really, it was just a little less freaky if she softened it that way.)

And then there was America, who’d just kinda popped into their lives one day and started kicking ass and ordering the world to her liking. Well, up until that afternoon, when she had just popped _out_ of Kate's life to someplace very _other_.

… Still. Yesterday evening Kate had been, incredibly enough, standing right next to her superhero (her living, breathing superhero, thank everything), and he was talking to her like she was vital to his plans. They were discussing SHIELD secrets and visual identification protocols, and the consequences of failure ("Fridging," apparently)... and he had a bag full of chicken feed in his hands.

Kate had stood motionless in the middle of the yard until Lucky brushed up against her. That had startled her into movement. With no idea what to do with herself, and no direction forthcoming from the other humans, she sat on a step and curled her arms around her knees. The chickens had all come out to greet Skye in a clucking, fluttering mass of black and red, gold and white, spots and speckles, bars and lacing, red combs and beady little eyes. Hawkeye-- Clint, anyone who could knuckle a chicken on the head like that was definitely a Clint-- distributed feed to them all.

He and Skye had been bantering back and forth as they worked, tossing out increasingly paranoid suggestions like they conspiracied for a living. (Okay, okay, it sounded like that might actually be an accurate job description for Skye, and Clint Barton was ex-SHIELD, after all.) Kate had started to harbor an inferiority complex. 

“I’ll have to do some major work on Frank Barney’s profile, boss,” Skye had said when they were finished, as she brushed her hands off on her knees. “Make sure all your ID and shit is up to par.”

“You’re gonna have to recreate it, Skye,” Clint said, turning to her. “And fast. I lost it all when I went overboard.”

“You-- you _were_ on Ian Quinn’s yacht,” Kate said, finding her voice at last. “Dad said you _couldn’t_ be. He was… he said Quinn didn’t….” And then she looked from one to the other of them. They were raising nearly identical eyebrows at her. It was actually pretty spooky how they managed it with such different brows, the higher eyebrow mobile and tawny as the matching beard, the lower one slim, dark, and in need of just a little shaping. 

“Um. They’re… friends," Kate answered the eyebrows. "Kinda. Dad and Quinn. I think he’s a jerk. Quinn, I mean. Well, Dad, too, I guess.”

“Okay, we’re going to save that one for later,” Clint said, when Skye opened her mouth. He hadn't really paused in his clean-up and was already headed back inside. “But we will come back to it, when we’re not trying to figure out how I’m going to fool SHIELD. So. Kate. Chicken or beef?” He was gone through the door before she could answer. Which was okay, because her only answer was:

“Um?” 

Kate was beginning to think that was just going to become her standard reaction. She felt like she was falling increasingly behind in a relay race, with someone up ahead of her impatiently waving the baton behind their ass, waiting for her to grab it.

“Potpies,” Skye said. “We picked up a bunch from the Blue Peter. Want one?”

“Sure,” Kate said, then-- “Wait, _how_ long do we have to do all this?”

“Maybe two days,” Skye told her. “I’m glad you’re on board; I have no idea how we’re going to get all this shit done. _Man._ If only we were in a movie; we could really use a montage right now.”

So here Kate was, in her window, filing her nails, the low light from her window probably backlighting her a short distance out into the harbor, like she was the beacon of the world's most useless lighthouse. Below, on the beach, just where the long planking of the dock met the stairs leading down from their deck, a small shadow was standing, so still it might have been a ghost.

Or it might, from the faint, nearly blue light shining somewhere about wrist height, have been America, watching her back.

If only America had _actually been gone,_ like a girl should be, by all rights, when she’s just run off by literally punching a hole into another dimension and slipping through, then Kate wouldn't be wondering if she was hallucinating.

But no. No. Apparently at some point since that afternoon, America had disposed of the bug up her butt, punched her way back _into_ this dimension, and wrapped that stupid little apron around her hips for her shift at the Blue Peter, where she’d sold Hawkeye and Skye a bunch of pot pies.

Which was a problem, actually, a worse one than if she'd left for good. Leaving for good implied that America was just _done_ with Kate, and yeah, that would have hurt. A lot. A _lot_ a lot, maybe even. But hell it was bound to happen sometime-- right? And she'd either decided Kate wasn't gonna listen to her and come back to New York, not with Hawkeye around, or that Kate was clearly gonna ruin her life her own way and America was gonna opt out.

Coming back, though? She couldn't be _that_ attached to a waitressing job at a chintzy seaside diner. Really, it implied that she was attached enough to Kate to come back, even though Kate'd been behaving like a jerk a lot lately. Like maybe America'd just gone off to have a nice quiet sulk on some planet with, like, two moons and pink beaches, before coming home to just kinda be _near_ Kate, even if Kate got to _hang out with Hawkeye now_. And that? That wasn’t right.

America was far too cool to do something that pathetic.

She'd punch her own self in the face, first.

So that couldn't be America she was seeing outside her window at the moment, standing down there where sea met shore, waves probably lapping about her feet, salt spray on her calves, thighs... _hips_ , as she stood still as a sentinel, waiting for Kate. 

People didn't just _do_ that for Kate. They didn’t come back when she'd tried her best to push them away. They didn’t stand underneath her window at night, on the edge of the light, like they didn’t trust her to understand _respecting your boundaries_ unless they acted it out as literally as possible. Like.. like she was worth the effort even when she was being a jerk.

No one had ever done that for Kate before.

It wasn't affecting Kate. Wasn't making her at all question everything she'd said to America since she'd come to LBI. And if she _was_ replaying her entire conversation with America that afternoon, picking over every word that had come out of her mouth just before America had ragequit the planet for a short time? It was only because she wanted to be sure in her own mind that America wasn't going to go tell somebody about Hawkeye.

_Of course she won't. America? Snitch? Never._

Not the America, who'd wandered into the secret warehouse base Kate shared with Billy and Teddy and Eli one night, looking like some kind of hoodrat goddess. Who'd first explained that she'd followed them all the way through their patrol. And then, after Eli had yelled at her a bit to either go tell somebody or get out, had just shrugged and said that if they really wanted to _help people_ they needed help themselves, then wandered over to a punching bag.... and knocked it across the entire hall. 

Not the America who, it had turned out one night when Kate had followed her home, squatted with a bunch of teenage runaways so that there was someone to keep them safe at night. 

Not the America who'd once casually explained that she'd left her home dimension ( _home dimension_ \-- seriously, chickens were nothing compared to that) because it was too peaceful, and she wanted to go somewhere she could help.

That America wouldn't snitch. Ever. Even if she seemed to make it her job to frustrate Kate, to say the exact worst things at the worst times.

"I've seen the way you look at me," she'd said, one day when Kate was complaining about being the token straight girl on the team, "you're not that straight." 

Kate had ignored it, because _I think I know my own sexuality, right?_

Except that it was nearing midnight, and the Trashcan was dead silent, and Kate couldn't get away from herself, couldn't find a way to distract herself from the truth anymore.

So maybe she'd known for a while that she was only, um, _mostly_ straight. That wasn't so shocking.

No, it was maybe more that the only reason she could think of that America'd come back was that for some reason Kate meant enough to her that she was willing to risk looking pathetic. 

Moreover, maybe the reason America'd left in the first place was less that she was mad and more that she was that she actually was-- and Kate knew perfectly well how absurd this sounded, and in a rational world she'd never have thought about it, but there _were_ infinite parallel universes and America came from one of them, plus Kate'd just met Hawkeye, so her absurd quotient was pretty high at the moment-- jealous.

Of Hawkeye.

Because of Kate.

Which, when you got right down to it, made _no sense at all_. Hawkeye was... was _Hawkeye_. And America was, well, America. It made as much sense as comparing a sale pair of Louboutins with a crisp autumn day in Central Park. There was no possible question to which one or the other was the answer.

If America thought there was, America needed to be taught different.

Which meant that maybe Kate should be thinking about how to _do_ that.

 _Yeah_ , Kate thought, putting down her file and turning off the light, deliberately not looking out to see if the shadow had moved, _Right._ If. _As if that would be the case in the first place.There's a sign you're overtired, Kate._

**Three**

"Who let that chicken in here?" Clint asked, pointing behind Kate. She turned, to find Tony in the kitchen, strutting around the cupboards and pecking up crumbs from the biscuits they'd had for breakfast. Her feathers were glowing in the early morning light, washed to clear gold, and she wriggled her way under the chair legs as if the three big humans and one hairy dog in the room didn't exist at all.

"Damnit," Kate said, and flung a used makeup sponge at the hen. Skye pulled open the screen door with her heel, and batted the chicken back outside, without ever looking up from her laptop. She was typing frantically, still bleary-eyed and tousled with the morning. Kate knew she wasn't much better; she'd been up before dawn to pick up Skye and bring her out to North Bar, and her eyes felt like they were going to slide off her face.

A superhero was relying on the two of _them_ to get him through this?

"Okay, boss, everything should be rigged. I'll be right outside the window, working."

"Good," Clint said, and closed his eyes so that Kate could run highlights along the top of his eyesocket, changing the line along his nose. She realized she was sticking her tongue out between her teeth as she worked, and snapped it back inside. "This would be so much easier if we just had a latex nose or something," he continued.

"You are such a dork," Kate told him. Because, well, he was.

\----

The windows faced east, over the towers of Manhattan, but if Phil hadn't known, he'd never have guessed it from the visual evidence that morning. Even when the blood red vertical blinds revolved and retreated to their corners, the tint of the windows let in only muted light. Phil stood at them, fiddling with his tie and looking out into the rising dawn in a way he rarely could at home on North Bar.

There, as Clint had noticed the first day (the only day) he woke up in Phil's room, morning brought no soft muted light creeping into the bedroom, not from windows or from light fixtures. Dawn _broke_ , overwhelming the pitch blackness that was night on North Bar. That might be exactly what Clint was experiencing now as he got ready for the visit from the Stark Industries employee assigned to process his intake packet.

(That would be, at least in part, Pepper at work-- in all the time Phil had worked there, employees always came to Human Resources; Human Resources coming to the employee was a miracle on the order of mountain-moving.)

Phil _worried_ of course, but in an abstract way. Clint was a superhero-- and a former spy-- and he had a hacker at his side. If he'd done the smart thing and talked to Doc Halliday, he had little to fear. Hell, he was probably at least ten times as prepared as Phil was for the coming day. Especially since he didn't have to put on a goddamn suit.

Wearing a tie full-time was going to take some getting used to; with the exception of those two godawful post-Army years in New York, Phil had never had something strangling his neck at all hours of the day for so long altogether. He'd nearly cut his tie off, at the end of the day the day before. Not that it would have done any good; seven of the damn things, in various colors, had been waiting for him at his door when he woke up his first morning. The entire day, his first in this absurd new world, had been spent at SHIELD. It had passed in a frantic blur, doing his own intake, qualifying with various weapons, getting a full physical. Phil'd felt for a brief horrible moment like he was back in the Army after all.

He tried to be grateful that someone-- Pepper, again, probably, if not Nick-- had thought to provide them. They even coordinated with his one good suit (SHIELD had others on order-- Phil would have protested had not Melinda May told him to shut up about it. Apparently SHIELD suits were, marginally at least, bullet-proof.) Gratitude just wouldn't come.

Phil had attempted dressing in front of the full-length mirror that ran along one wall for about half it’s length, but had given it up when the very sight of himself produced a sensation like falling.

 _This is my life now_ , he thought, and wondered if the sun he was watching come up was even the same one rising on North Bar.

\----

"God the lighting in here is weird," Travis mumbled into his moustache. Clint tilted his head and lifted his eyebrows in a look he'd borrowed straight from Steve Rogers at his most "your newfangled technological whodingers, they confuse me." Travis wasn't paying attention to Clint's face, for once. He frowned as he poked at the viewscreen on the back of his camera. "I can't seem to get a decent shot at all."

It was his seventh attempt at getting a decent ID photo of Frank Barney to upload to Stark Industries' HR database, and both he and Clint were getting fidgety. Clint hid his fidgets behind increasingly deadpan sarcasm. Travis's, on the other hand, were getting worse.

If he was a SHIELD agent in disguise, it was a _very_ good disguise. He looked exactly like an aging hipster who'd gone to seed above the waist, and joined the corporate world below. 

"It's this window, and the sun off the water. It's like this every morning," Clint reassured him. "You get used to it."

Travis wasn't a bad guy, all things considered. Even if he didn't really _care for_ chickens.

It was too bad they kept getting into the kitchen while Travis worked, and wandering around his feet, pecking at the crumbs that seemed more prevalent than usual underneath the kitchen table. The latch on the door was worn, Frank had explained to him. Nothing to be done. Then he'd picked Doc, the newly-named Dominique, up and pushed her back out the door.

Travis stopped fiddling with the camera, sighed, and held it back up, smiling tightly at Clint.

"Okay, one more time," he said, "say 'Cheese.'" He clicked the shutter, just as light glanced through the open windows, flickering across Clint's face and making him squint.

Travis didn't even bother to look down at the viewscreen, he just sighed.

"You know, whatever. Good enough, it's fucking good enough. They wanted better, they coulda brought you to New York."

\----

There were alarms blaring in other parts of the Tower; they filtered down to Phil faintly through the corridor outside his rooms, and he pulled his jacket on with a snap and headed for the--

Well, he didn't know where, precisely. What _was_ the duty station for a half-trained, mostly unwanted, grudgingly housed, SHIELD liaison?

"Agent Coulson," said JARVIS and, like always so far, Phil conjured up a mental image of a robot in a waistcoat standing somewhere in the shadows, just out of his line of sight. JARVIS unsettled him. A lot. "I believe Agent Hand would like your presence in the situation room downstairs. If you will kindly step to the elevator, I can assist you in finding your way."

"Thanks," Phil said, stepping to the elevator as requested, even while he drowned in a sea of received pronunciation unease. "Why the alarm, where are the Avengers, and can I see them?"

"They are currently 'suiting up,' and will be boarding a quinjet shortly. We understand that a particularly dangerous fugitive from SHIELD custody is causing some consternation outside of Washington D.C.; Agent Hand will have all the details for you. "

Tony Stark had left for Malibu the night before, muttering something under his breath about contractors, and Thor was off in London, for what Stark had called a "conjugal visit." That left Captain America, the Black Widow, and the Falcon onsite. It hardly seemed fair to the fugitive.

"Uh huh." The elevator was in front of him now, opening with a soft hiss, and Phil stepped inside. As the doors closed, he bit his lip. _Causing some consternation_ , he thought. _I assume that means there will be hostages, or smoking ruins, by the time they get there._

"JARVIS," he said, and he could practically feel the elevator pause, "where do the quinjets take off from?"

Well. After all.

It wasn't like he hadn't warned Pepper about himself.

\----

"Okay, just one more thing, then we can go home," Travis said, digging around in his worn messenger bag for something that had evidently found new pocket universes to get lost in, there at the bottom. "Biometrics."

"Huh?" said Clint, in his best Frank Barney. "Like eyeball readings and shit?"

"Nah," Travis told him. "You need to be, like, executive level for them to bother with that shit. No, just fingerprints."

"Oh, like ink pad and stuff? I might have one, if you can't find yours--" he didn't, but hey, couldn't hurt to look.

"Ink pad? What, you a hermit like the last guy? No, this is the 21st century, dude," Travis said, and finally found what he was looking for. It was a Starkpad, and he pulled up an app as he chattered, with firm swipes of his pudgy fingers. "Here you go. Just press here, it'll scan your fingerprints right in and zap 'em to the central database."

"It will?" Clint leaned forward, placing both hands on the sides of his chair for balance.

"Yeah, it wi-- well, it _usually_ will," Travis amended. "Okay, why can't I get onto Stark wireless from here?"

"Oh," Clint shrugged. "Fiberoptic cable goes out all the time. It's buried under the bay, right, but sometimes it gets cut over in the marshes. Want me to go check? Or will, like, 4G work?"

"Arg, no, the file's too big for that," Travis told him, and shook his pad. "No, I'll just upload it when I get somewhere with wireless. Let's take those prints now."

"Okay," Clint said, and pressed his fingers carefully down.

\----

"Hi," Phil said, as he sat himself down in the open jumpseat and began to buckle up. The quinjet was startlingly quiet. _Yes, Phil, that's what 'stealth' means,_ Phil thought, though the voice in his head was more Clint's than his own. "I hear there's a guy who can become anything he absorbs, who's just walked into a secure facility near the Pentagon? And now he's rampaging down the Columbia Pike?"

"What the hell are you doing here?" Captain America said, glaring at him. He and Sam Wilson-- the Falcon, on mission time, and Phil had perhaps best get used to that-- were seated across from Phil in the other jump seats, already restrained, and looking mutinous beneath their masks.

"Coming with," Phil told him, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "What did you expect me to do?"

\----

"Kate!" Skye cried, flinging herself out the door of her van and grabbing Kate, who was just arriving with fresh coffee for them both. The trailing cord of her earbuds tried to strangle her, and she pulled at it impatiently with one hand while levering Kate in front of her laptop with the other. 

"What the hell?" Kate asked. 

Skye pointed to the laptop screen, where an audio feed was playing from the North Bar cottage kitchen. Skye'd stashed another of the little Captain America pins on the corkboard Phil used to hold coupons, important mail, and seed packets. They were coming in way more handy than she'd thought, the pins, and at least they blended in almost too well with Phil's general decorating theme.

"The fingerprint switcheroo isn't going to work right," she told Kate. "He's not doing it on a print pad, he's got a goddamn tablet. If Clint hadn't cut the fiberoptics cable this morning, we'd already be screwed."

"Okay," Kate said, putting down their cups so that she could run a hand over her mouth. "Okay. So. What. We... what? Can't you just, like hack it and put in another file?"

"Do I _look_ like I have a fingerprint app on my computer?" Skye said. Kate's reaction was far from reassuring. "And even if I did, chances are the files wouldn't match. No, we need to distract him long enough to _steal_ the tablet, hack into it, get it to the Blue Peter, get the-- arg, this is never going to work! Even if you pretend to be me in the van so I can hack, I'd have to be able to _fly_ to get shit done in time."

Kate stiffened, biting her lip, and closed her eyes. When she looked back up at Skye, it was with the look of someone about to bite into a really suspect sandwich. Something that might have pickles lurking on the interior.

"I might be able to help with that," she said.

\----

"You're putting yourself at enough risk already. This is final. You stay in here while we handle Creel." Captain America said, and pointed emphatically at the quinjet floor. Phil fought the urge to wring his considerable neck, or shake him by the shoulders or.... or... or tell Clint to name a _chicken_ after him.

"We've been having this argument since we passed over Passaic! You can't expect me to know your job and what it entails if you wrap me in bubble wrap and keep me away from all the action," he said instead, and hoped he didn't sound like a seven year old whining that he _wasn't_ sleepy and why couldn't he stay up to watch the movie? 

"And you can't do your job if you're dead, either!" Captain America snapped back. Which was very nearly word for word a line Captain America had used, in a story that younger Phil used to tell himself at night time, whispering it under the covers while he tried to get to sleep. It was really kind of frustrating to be proven right.There had to be a better way of handling the situation, but Phil was too damn at sea already; he didn't even know what shore would look like. _Clint would know; I'll have to ask._

"We're landing in two," the Black Widow's voice came over the comms; "strap in and get ready." 

Captain America huffed and sat down abruptly, and the Falcon tightened his buckles. Phil did the same, and then shot his cuffs for good measure. And maybe just to remind himself that he was in uniform, however much it looked like a blue pinstripe, and this was indeed his job, too.

\----

"America!" Kate called, and changed direction abruptly, running down the steep hill along the side of the Blue Peter to where she'd just seen America, already dressed for work in a t-shirt that needed to be a lot heavier, heaving a sack of garbage into the dumpster.

America turned and saw her, and Kate nearly backpedaled from the look on her face. It was kinda part anger and part relief and part something weirdly despairing, and no sane person would stick around after causing that look. 

"Please," Kate said, finally coming to a stop.

"Oh, now you're ready to talk, Princess? Right as I'm hauling trash? Great timing."

"America," Kate panted, pressing one hand to her diaphragm in a vain attempt to stop panting. "Shut up. I need your help. We need it. Badly."

"Help with _what?_ " America asked, eyes narrowing.

\----

"No, not that direction, there are too many civilians that way," Phil said, watching the revolving feeds from every public security cam that SHIELD had been able to hack into. He was still in the quinjet, on Captain America's orders, but he was at least able to handle their communications back to SHIELD (and the twenty-odd nearby agencies and city and county emergency departments) while Agent Hand worked behind the scenes. The effect of all the feeds was mosaic-like on his tablet; the component parts practically too small to decipher. "And Hand tells me we've only got a small cleanup crew anyway."

"Right, I copy," Wilson-- the Falcon (geez, Phil, get it _right_ )-- said, and then there was a pause, which Phil figured was him scouting out alternatives. "Okay, there's a building site up the street, looks like its abandoned. Backs onto a power substation. Only about a block from the quinjet. What about that?"

Phil hunted frantically, pecking at the tablet to enlarge and shrink various boxes, until he finally found one that matched the Falcon's description. 

"Shouldn't be a problem," the Black Widow replied, her voice calm despite the fact that she was speaking as she was backing up at speed. The man coming after her wasn't unusually tall, but compared to her, he may as well have been. Anyway, as he came he spun a huge brass ball and chain around his head, like a knight's mace on steroids. He came steadily, without breaking stride, despite the fact that the Widow had been shooting him all the while with both of her handguns. She cursed over the feed, switched to her Widow's Bites-- and watched the electricity dissipate uselessly as the man turned briefly to stone. Phil watched her grainy little grayscale form back into a blind spot between cameras. "Cap, cut off his retreat."

"Sure," said Captain America, and a few moments later, the exit from the other end of the street was cut off by a falling... truck. A falling semi truck, careening to the curb and flipping onto its side. Phil didn't even bother to ask. "That work?"

A chorus of "yes"es from comms. Phil heard them all with relief, and turned back to the video feed on the empty lot-- no, the _mostly_ empty lot. In a corner, several grainy black-and-white lumps started to separate themselves from a stationary, similarly-pixelated mass. One of them leaned around a corner and looked down the street. Phil started to swear.

"What's wrong?" the Widow asked over comms.

"Civilians in the lot. Squatters, I think. In a corner. Do you copy, Falcon?"

The Falcon was the one Avenger Phil didn't have a visual on, and he wrestled down how unhappy that made him-- prickly in the same way that not being able to find Tasha the... _not_ -Tasha the hen... had made him.

"I copy." the Falcon said, just when Phil was starting to think about doing drastic things. "I'll just-- shit, if I come lower he's gonna spot me too soon. Can't risk him seeing me head in there."

"Gain some altitude, Falcon," Captain America's voice was tight. Just like how the younger Phil had always imagined it would be, in such a circumstance. 

"Yeah, but someone's gotta get the civilians evacuated."

"On it," Phil said, and threw down his headset.

It meant he missed hearing Captain America swear.

That his younger self wasn't around to realize what he'd missed was undoubtedly a good thing.

\----

"Please, America," Kate said, resisting the urge to reach out to America, grab her hands, drop to her knees, and pull a full daytime television on her. She wrapped both hands around her own stomach, instead, and pressed tight. "Please, c'mon, we really need your help. Don't... don't let my... don't let me being an idiot get in the way of that. Help us."

"Damnit." America rolled her eyes, and ran a hand through her thick tangle of hair, looking down at the asphalt, out to sea, anywhere but at Kate. Like Kate was anymore _painful_ to look at than America herself. "Why, Kate? Why the fuck should I? For _you?_ Is that it? You been running from me every day since I saved your ass at the Met, since you realized you _might_ get a bit wet in the drawers when I was around, and _now_ you want me to just fly off and help this washed-up superhero you've got a crush on? You think I'd risk these guys finding out about me just for you?"

Kate decided she would graciously ignore all the implications of "washed-up superhero" (and "crush"), in favor of the greater good. Sometime she might even explain to America just how forbearing she had been.

"No," she said instead, straightening, pulling her chin up, trying to look way more confident than she felt. "I don't. Though, uh, I'm sorry about that. No, I think you'll do it because this is something that needs fixing." She shrugged. "You're a superhero too, right? Isn't that what you do?"

\----

They weren't just civilians, they were very obviously homeless, and Phil had just nearly knocked over the elaborate shelter of assorted civic detritus they'd built against the one concrete wall that remained on the building site. 

"Sorry," Phil said, and reached out reflexively to stabilize the pile of dented copper piping that was threatening to collapse and bring them all down at the ankles. They looked up at him; an assortment of faces ranging from should-be-in-a-nursing-home to should-be-in-a-nursery, and Phil wondered just what kind of family he'd found. "You need to evacuate, now," he told them, feeling awkward.

They looked at each other and the skeletal guy in his-- hell, he looked like he was old as the hills, but in homeless-years that could mean anything from forty on up-- the skeletal guy, full stop, straightened and glared at Phil.

"Evacuate where, why, and what army's gonna make us?" he asked, and Phil looked around to find the young mother quietly gesturing to her kids to pick up their bags, and the teens already beginning to slip into the shadows. 

"Anywhere that's not here, because there's an insane power-morphing ex-felon fighting with three of the Avengers and they're all headed your way, and no Army, soldier, just me." Phil said. He clasped his hands in front of himself, rocked back and forth on his heels, and tried his best to project ordinariness at the guy. _I'm not the problem. The supervillain is the problem._ "And Captain America, if you wait long enough," Phil continued after a pause. "But I'm fairly certain waiting long enough would hurt."

The guy snorted.

"Hell, what do I want to meet Captain America for? He can't solve any problem I got." He looked Phil up and down. "All right, Suit Guy, get us out of here."

Phil did, his brain and body set to autopilot as he shooed them away; civilian-herding was so mundane by now it was in his muscle memory. He had just shoved the last of them out of the lot, and was picking up a garbage bag full of school books and shoes and a coil of copper wire, intending to follow, when the Black Widow backed into the lot.

She was a lot more impressive on the big.... real live... screen, her red locks more nuanced than even HD could pronounce, her back straight, movements precise and contained. Phil would have sworn the man following her grew larger with each passing minute, and laws of physics be damned. He whirled the ball round and round his head, before flinging it at her, and she jumped back.

The bags crinkled in Phil's grip as his hands reflexively closed on them. 

_Oh this is going to go so poo--_ he had time to think. And then Creel had seen him, was turning, and even his _smile_ was hard as stone. Phil leapt backwards instinctively. The brass ball, chain rattling on behind it, landed where he'd been the moment before. It came down with a splash in the dirty puddle Phil had been skirting around. Phil rammed a thin length of copper pipe through a link in the chain and twisted it out of Creel's hands.

"Give that to me" he growled, reaching out a hand. And then "Hey! Stop tickling me!"

Creel spun around, roaring. Phil just made out the Black Widow, directing the sting of her Widow's Bites into his exposed armpits.

"Done playing with you, lady," he growled at her, yanking on the copper. "Try that again and see what you get back." He was beginning to let the copper seep up his arm, like his skin was wicking up metal.

"Hey!" the Falcon shouted, just when Phil was readying himself for another leap backwards. "Coulson, catch!" 

Something long and black snaked down from on high, floating like it had nothing better to do and wasn't really up on this gravity thing Newton had gone on about. Phil reached up for it, strained... and had the man swipe it from the air just above his head.

"Ah! Even better than the lady's toys," he said, and stuck the power cord in his mouth. "Tasty."

Phil wasn't too proud to admit it; he skedaddled. 

"Now!" Captain America shouted, his voice faint, and the neighborhood shut down. Every window went dark. The traffic signals winked off. The hum of heating and cooling units and ventilation fans stopped. The entire neighborhood hushed and waited.

Creel tried drinking down the energy in long gulps, his enormous adam's apple bobbing with each one. He tried, when that overwhelmed him, dribbling it out the sides of his mouth. As a last resort, he tried getting away, but the electricity was flowing through the copper of his body, into the water at his feet, locking him in place, an open current. He became altogether blue as he failed to absorb the energy fast enough, and his skin began to pulse outwards as it sought new ways through him.

"Aaaaaaaaah," Creel sighed, just when Phil thought he couldn't stand it any longer. "Aaaaah. So gooooood." 

And he shattered.

\----

Clint said a fairly genial goodbye to Travis, all things considered. After all, the guy was just doing his job, and he played a fairly decent exasperated techie-- and he probably was. Whether he worked for SHIELD and Stark Industries was borrowing him or vice versa, Clint didn't much care, he was just relieved he'd the guy off the island before he accidentally kicked a chicken.

They didn't need him leaving with a bleeding leg, courtesy of Lucky.

"You've got your ID card," Travis said, shrugging his bag into the back of his SUV, "and you'll get your codes when we've cleared the rest of the background check. I-9'll get processed when I get back." He was leaning on the open door of the SUV, and he didn't see the hand that reached up from under the frame and pulled the bag down. 

"Well, good," Clint said, doing his best aw shucks and stuffing his hands in his pockets. "Glad to be official; Phil said it'd be all right, but I mean, that doesn't mean it will be, right? With all this..." he waved his hands in the air to indicate "official junk," and carefully didn't watch as the hand replaced the bag.

"Yeah," said, Travis, "Well, I'll be seeing you." He waved Clint off, and turned to get into his SUV.

"Hey!" Clint called, just as Travis was sliding into the seat, "You did remember the eggs for Phil, right?"

Travis gave him a thumbs up, and Clint took that as his cue.

Clint was nearly out of the parking lot when the bit white utility van barrelled down the ramp, straight at the SUV and nearly-- nearly-- missed hitting it.

"Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry!" Kate Bishop said, getting out of the driver's seat and running over to look at the two bumpers, still mushed together. "I couldn't stop-- those stupid brakes-- oh, gosh, you're not hurt, are you? Do we have to, like, exchange insurance? I've never had this happen before, I promise."

Clint kept on walking away, though he was wondering just what the _hell_ America Chavez's arm had been doing under the van.

_Skye, where the hell are you?_

\----

"What the hell were you thinking? You weren't in armor, you weren't on comms, you could have gotten someone hurt, you could have gotten killed, or you could have gotten in our way. Did you think that was the way to make an impression, Coulson?"

Phil had always imagined, somehow, that Captain America would look noble and stern when he was reaming you out. Very _all this is for your own good_ , like he belonged on Mount Rushmore looking disapproving with all the other icons. 

He did. He just... he also looked like... well....

He also looked just a little like a very overgrown angry dormouse. Or maybe a pony. Something entirely too cute to really convince you it was angry.

Phil hadn't expected that part. 

Fugitive superheroes washing up on his beach, mysterious intruders on his island, spunky girl hackers and teenage socialite archers, Marcus Johnson coming back from the dead and shanghaiing him into a job, somehow all of these things were less surreal than the realization that Steve Rogers, Captain America, the man behind the shield, was really _adorable_ when he was angry.

"No sir," Phil said, resisting the urge to reach out and pinch his cheek, "I thought that was the way to save civilian lives."

Behind him, somewhere, he thought he heard the Black Widow snort. 

"You're not coming with next time, Coulson. Or _ever_ again," Rogers growled, and Phil shrugged.

"I understand." Phil said, and he thought he really did. In spite of Rogers's words-- and Phil was certain that Captain America himself believed them-- it wasn't so much the danger he seemed to object to as it was Phil inserting himself into the team. Phil wasn't an Avenger, he was SHIELD, and so newly SHIELD he squeaked, no less. He began to see the shape and depth of the rift growing between them. "Any other time, I'll need to be back in the situation room, anyway, as Agent Hand won't be there."

There was a long silence between them, and then Rogers nodded and sat, clearly exhausted, and Phil let himself relax a little.

"Good. I appreciate the attempt to help, Coulson, I do. But this isn't what we ask of liaisons, and it's not what we want. I'm glad that's your instinct, though."

"Thank you," Phil said, and settled down into his own jumpseat, buckling up and trying to compose himself. His ears were still buzzing with the mission high, his blood thumping along in his veins, and he itched to be rid of it. He thought again of that night on North Bar when he'd gone looking for Clint and Lucky, half sure he was too late, and that Jawbones had killed them. The way that relief had left him knock-kneed and nearly weeping. And then he thought of everything that had come afterwards, and he couldn't help his smile. 

"Of course," he said softly, half to himself, "If I'm ever in that position again, I'll do the same damn thing. It may not be what you want, but it's what I do. And I'm too damn old to change now."

\----

"Haha, yes!" Skye said, pumping her fist. "Take _that_ Travis Anton McGee, and don't ever use your cat's name as a password again." She had Travis's tablet open on the Blue Peter's bartop, and it had just unlocked all its secrets to her.

"How do you even?" Tom asked her, and America Chavez leaned forward on the bar, as if she, too, had a vital interest in the answer.

"Eh," Skye said, "he seemed like a person who'd name his cat Pixel." Plus, she'd had more than enough time that morning to find his Facebook feed, while waiting for Clint to finish with him. There were a _lot_ of cat pictures on it. "Here," she turned the tablet around and held it out to Tom, "Press here, and hold 'till I tell you to stop."

Tom looked down at the tablet for a long moment, then back up at his two waitresses.

"This is what I get for making impulsive hiring decisions," he said, and pressed his fingers to the scanning pad.

"Oh," Skye said, "you love us." That earned her a snort from America. "Okay, done." She made sure the file had saved correctly, shut down the tablet, and handed it back to America, who tucked it inside her jacket.

"Fly like the wind!" Skye told her, and America rolled her eyes.

She was already running by the time she got out the door, though. Skye was right on her heels, arriving at the door a few seconds after her, but America was already gone. The street was empty, except for the mums in their doorside tubs, swaying forlornly in a chilly breeze.

\----

"Hey, Coulson?" the Falcon-- Sam Wilson, after the action was over, or so he'd reiterated several times already-- said, collapsing into the jump seat next to him. Phil looked over, as Wilson removed his goggles and rubbed his eyes. 

"Yeah?" Phil asked, keeping his voice as light as possible, trying to settle his nerves. If it was a little more difficult than usual, well, he _had_ just been reprimanded by Captain America. His younger self would never have spoken to him again after that.

"Good job today," Sam said, and looked up at him. The smile on his face was weak, and tired, but it was there all the same. Phil felt himself warming under it, even as adrenaline started to seep away, leaving his limbs floppy as broken reeds. "Glad you were with us."

\----

"Is this a three or an eight, though?" Kate asked, holding out the grimy bit of paper Travis had written his phone number on, and pointing at the digit in question.

"An _eight_ " the guy spat, and Kate resisted the urge to roll her eyes. _C'mon, America, get back here and--_ a ding and pop from the back of the SUV made Kate shove the paper in Travis's face.

"You sure?" she said.

"I think I know my own phone number, girl," he told her. "Now, is there anything else?"

The SUV door was closed again, and Kate tried not to find it terribly hot that America was apparently capable of breaking into locked cars without leaving a trace.

"No," she said, with her sweetest smile, "I think we're good here."

**Four**

A basket of eggs was waiting for Phil when he got back to his suite, tied up with a purple ribbon. (Probably something Skye or Kate had done-- he just couldn't see Clint taking the time to weave the ribbon in and out of the reeds, nor making the elaborate multi-looped knot at the side. Then again, and on second thought, it was even less likely that either of the girls had taken the time. Maybe Clint counted decorative ribbonry among his many talents. His fingers certainly were agile enough-- as Phil knew intimately.) There were a couple blue eggs, more browns, a few fat white ones, and Phil could almost match some of them to chickens, after all this time. 

He sat down on the bed with a sigh and shucked himself of his accessories: toed off his shoes, untied his tie and set it aside, removed his watch, unbuttoned his cuffs and collar. Then he reached for the basket and set it in his lap, turning one of the eggs over and over in his palm, squeezing and releasing. 

When he closed his eyes, he could see the yard in front of him. Chicken coop to the right, chickens settling down in the gathering dark with last soft clucks and mutters. Lucky settled on his left with a long-suffering doggy sigh, his bulk warm against Phil's thigh.

Behind him, from the porch, a floorboard creaked with the weight of a strong man's step.

In his pocket, his phone buzzed, and Phil fished it out without opening his eyes.

"Hi," he said, maybe into the phone, maybe to the man behind him on the porch.

\----

There was a party going on at the Blue Peter and no mistake. It bubbled up at the windows and spilled out the doors in a flood of chatter and light, whenever one opened.

Skye, Tom, and America might all be nominally working, but really they were grinning whenever they crossed paths, like they were giving each other mental high-fives. The mood had been growing ever since Skye'd come out of the back room and given them all the thumbs up that meant she'd seen Clint's file (bearing Tom's fingerprints) go through Stark Industries servers, and those of SHIELD, and pass unremarked. They were by no means out of the woods, but at least they’d fought and defeated the biggest bear in the forest.

Clint was still in a state of minor shock about how well it had all come off. Not because of Skye or Kate or even Doc Halliday-- he _knew_ what each of them was expected to do and of them all he'd considered himself the weak link. After all this time, his nose for luck was acute, and Doc Halliday's luck smelled strong and steady, more than enough to cover them all. Kate's, well, Kate was something like nine years old, spoiled rotten, and _perfect_ \-- she didn't realize it yet but her own luck ran with her like dolphins beside a boat, streaking and breaking. Skye _was_ luck, she shaped and created it. 

His own sway-back, limping, weirdly streaky luck had been Clint’s concern, and if his day had seen a steady litany under his breath of _notice me, notice me, notice me,_ well, no one had to know it. Too hard to explain.

It had _worked,_ and that was startling enough.

More startling at the time was that Doc Halliday had brought Tom partway into their conspiracy. "His prints shouldn't be in any database, though I'll check. And he'll do it if I ask the right way. If I ask for Phil's sake, that is. That man owes him more than he thinks he can repay. And Phil, that fool, doesn't think there's a debt there at all." 

Clint had taken her word for it. He'd also, even before she'd mentioned it (pinky up and cup of coffee halfway to her mouth, as if it were an afterthought), decided he needed to sit at Tom's bar more often. Assure Tom that Frank Barney felt the same burden of debt, to Phil-- and now to him. If the way Tom was bouncing around tonight, filled with secrets and about five years younger, was any indication, it hadn’t been a hardship.

Tom had at least been expected. Clint felt, in retrospect, like he _should_ have expected America Chavez, given the way Kate casually dragged people into her own internal novel, but he hadn’t. He’d have to watch out for that, in the future.

Unlike Tom, too, America apparently knew who Clint really was, and he wasn’t sure yet what to think about that-- much less what _she_ thought about that. She was trying to make herself a target worthy to be in Kate's sites, and Clint suspected he himself was merely a side-issue. At least, if Kate ever brought herself to loose that arrow, he would be. Until then, America might dislike him but Kate was his bond. America wouldn't give him up while he and Kate were tight.

Inside, they were all celebrating, loud-voiced and half-sloshed. (Except for Doc Halliday, who was neither of those things. She sat cherubically in a booth and everyone revolved around her.) Their intoxicated relief had caught on with most of the regulars, like a contact high, and the warmth was enough to take the chill off the air, even out here on the deck.

Stars spangled the water, constantly being smashed into foam down in the shadows where waves crashed around the palings. Fall was rapidly turning the breeze bitter, and Clint huddled down in a corner next to the piled iron chairs, cupping a cell phone to his ear and straining to catch every word of the warm voice currently coming from it. 

Skye’d pressed the phone into his hands just a few minutes ago, muttering at him. It had come in one of Quinn’s crates, which she still picked at from time to time. Had a built-in voice changer-- nothing drastic, just something that lost a little on the low end, sped things up a titch. She’d programmed in two numbers. Oh-- and Kate wanted to put her number in, too, later. 

“Just… you can’t assume no one’s listening in, okay?” Skye’d finished.

Okay.

Sure. Whatever she said.

Clint had the damn thing dialing before he’d even gotten out the door.

“Hi,” Phil had said over the line as Clint stepped outside and blinked, half-blind for a moment and feeling the wheel of the night sky above him like he used to as a child.

“Hey,” he said back. “Did you get the eggs?”  
\-----

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: the Avengers get used to Phil, North Bar gets used to Clint, Kate Does Something Clever, and Nat notices.
> 
> We're back! And I'd thought this was going to be a shorter chapter. :laughs and sobs at the same time:
> 
> For today's [tumbr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/99266376596/washed-ashore-chapter-13-shakedown-cruises-kathar), have some Carl Creel as he is in Agents of SHIELD. I'm not saying there's a pattern to my background villians. Two is still a coincidence, after all. Three though....


	14. Rendezvous, Missed and Otherwise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil woos the Avengers, Kate woos America, Clint and Phil fail to woo each other, and Skye and Natasha try to keep it all together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: brief mentions of chicken maladies, present and absent.

**One**

_The yolks in the skillet were orange as the rising sun_ \-- Phil tried not to laugh as he had the thought. It sounded like something that belonged in a Farm to Table spread from a co-op circular.

It certainly wasn’t anything to get teary and maudlin over. Shouldn't be choking him up, that he had _proper_ eggs, from proper bug-eating marauding chickens, for the first time since he and Clint had sat studying sketches of SHIELD’s secure areas over fried eggs on toast, with Lucky under the kitchen table, guarding both their feet from the morning chill.

_Oh hell, Phil, pull yourself together before you start writing a memoir or something equally pathetic._

The sun wasn’t even up yet; fall had come and the end of daylight savings time had not yet followed. Phil was taking advantage of the quiet and his first morning without crack-of-dawn meetings at SHIELD to explore the common rooms at Avengers Tower at his own leisure. The kitchen, with its floor-to-ceiling windows raised high over the Manhattan morning, was so far from his weathered galley-style set up in the cottage that it felt practically alien.

Clint used to live in this space, had been as used to these clean open lines and the skyline view as he was bumping hips with Phil when they passed each other on the crepuscular stumbles to the coffee pot. Phil closed his eyes for a moment and imagined him here now, skidding across the smooth tiles to punch at the chrome buttons on the rocket red espresso machine. 

The image hurt too much to hold long. He opened his eyes to reality and cracked his North Bar eggs in a skillet. After a minute spent contemplating the teflon coating, he went on a search for Actual Butter, if such a thing could be found in the futuristic landscape.

The refrigerator door opened with a crisp little hiss, and Phil stuck his head inside, muttering “butter, butter, _butter_ , butter” to himself.

“They tell me those nonstick affairs don’t need grease,” said a voice behind him, and Phil shot straight up.

Captain America was staring at him over the refrigerator door, his hair mussed still, his smile bleary, and his shoulders going on for _miles_ under his t-shirt. 

“Butter,” said Phil, a final time, and swallowed back a desperate blush.

“Somewhere behind that horrible protein powder Tony uses instead of a solid meal,” Steve Rogers said, and came around to root in the refrigerator for it. Phil stepped back, grabbing a last egg and squeezing, trying to soothe all the nerves threatening to jump from his skin.

“I couldn’t find a kitchen on my floor,” he said by way of apology, suddenly aware that Clint wasn't the only Avenger who flitted through this kitchen on a daily basis, and bit his lip before he could over-explain. Rogers shrugged, still buried in the fridge.

“You’re fine,” he said shortly, “we didn’t think about it either.” There was a pause, and the sound of several glass things thumping and tinkling. “We do have butter, I swear, I-- what the heck is this? Who-- oh, Nat. That explains that. Anyway,” another shuffle, and Phil backed up a little, wondering if he should be doing something other than watching Captain America’s very patriotic behind shift as he bent double in the fridge, “it’s fine.” Rogers straightened, and handed him a box of butter. “Just takes some getting used to.” 

Then he looked at the eggs in the pan.

“My god,” he said faintly. 

“Yes,” Phil agreed, knowing satisfaction was dripping in his voice, “indeed.” He started unearthing the butter from its packaging as a way to avoid reacting to Rogers. The man would either go, or stay, depending on quite what the awkward resettling he was doing in the background meant. Phil tried not to feel like there was a volcano shuffling its feet behind him, politely warning him it was about to blow.

“I, um,” Rogers said, once he’d shuffled to his satisfaction. He sighed. “You’re settling in all right, it looks like?”

“I think so,” Phil said, looking at the milk carton dubiously before pouring. “At least, as far as I can tell. SHIELD is… well, it’s an _experience_. I get the feeling I’m getting years of training stuffed into a few days. Director Fury said he thought I was picking things up fast, but then,” he looked up, staring into the distance as he remembered the dark chuckle in Fury’s voice the last time he and Phil had talked, “I remember him saying that just before we nearly got blown to smithereens by a jury-rigged rocket launcher once, too.”

That earned him a snort. 

“That sounds like my first go-round with the Avengers, too.” Rogers carefully put the butter back in the box, and slid the tab closed. He stared fixedly at it for a moment. “Look, Sam appreciated having you around, in DC. He let me know that.”

“He let me know that, too,” Phil said mildly, smiling at the memory. Sam Wilson had, in fact, made a point of letting Phil know he was welcome, and he and Natasha Romanov had been the two Avengers Phil'd seen most in the past few days. Rogers had been perfectly polite, but this was the first sign Phil’d had that he was willing to deal with Phil as more than a toy soldier SHIELD kept forgetting to put away. 

“Well,” Rogers sighed and picked up an egg himself, turning it over in his fingers. Phil tried not to fixate on it. “He’s not wrong. You were good out there.” He laid the egg on the counter and started to try and balance it. “You can't do it again,” he finished. “You could have put someone in danger. But… you handled it well.”

“Truthfully,” Phil said, letting himself smile and watching Rogers brace himself, “I’m more out of practice than I thought-- that was pretty overwhelming. And you all do it every day.”

“Good,” Rogers said, smiling back with a terribly endearing twist of his mouth. Phil wondered if it was too late to tell Clint _not_ to name a chicken after him. “And what have we learned?”

Eh, Clint’d probably named half of ‘em Steve by now, anyway.

“Well--” Phil snapped on the burner. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned I need better suits.”

Rogers closed his eyes for a moment, before pursing his lips and making a sound exactly like a startled horse.

 _I think he’s trying not to laugh._ Phil thought, and for a surreal moment thought he heard Clint’s own laughter in his ear. 

_He must have stood here with Rogers before, on dark mornings, snarking back and forth like he did with me._ Clint hadn’t talked about Rogers much, about _any_ of the Avengers, but Phil couldn’t imagine it any other way. This was Clint, easy-going, Lucky-like Clint, after all, friendly to everyone. How badly had Rogers taken it, when Clint had run?

He very nearly asked the man, was trying to figure out how to bring up the subject without being painfully obvious, when Rogers did it for him.

“Is that why Fury picked you? He decided I don’t have enough smartasses in my life?"

"I couldn't possibly comment," Phil said and Rogers snorted, turning dark. He looked Phil up and down, a quick appraising flicker, and Phil found himself bracing. He'd stepped on something, and he was uncomfortably certain he'd heard a _click_.

"Well it's his own fault," Roghers said at last. "The last one jumped out a window trying to get away from SHIELD.”

 _I am in no way prepared for this,_ Phil thought, and blinked, spatula raised and dripping egg.

"Okay, you win that round,” he managed. Rogers huffed, and looked away.

“Wasn’t fair of me.”

“You wanted to see how I’d react,” Phil said it quietly, refusing to drop his gaze. “It’s fair enough.”

“It’s not,” Rogers replied, and set the eggs he'd been playing with gently back in their basket. “Fury put you here to try and clean up that mess.”

“Not so easily done, I see.” His own eggs were going to be rubber in a moment more; Phil turned off the burner and shifted the pan away. 

“Clint was a good friend, and he used to be one of SHIELD's own. It still exists because of him. Whatever they thought he did, they should never have come for him like a criminal. Not in our home.”

Phil had spent so much time spent trying not to step on the Hawkeye landmine, it took him a moment to realize that the explosion had happened and he was still alive. It seemed like sharing time was almost over-- Rogers was straightening and turning.

"SHIELD’s got a lot of mopping left to do," he finished.

“I agree.” Phil let that hang in the air a moment, despite how badly he wanted to grab Rogers by his shirt and-- assuming it wasn’t already stretched so thin it would just snap-- shake more words out of him. “I’ll do my best,” he said, instead.

“Can’t unbreak that window, Coulson,” Rogers told him. “But you’re welcome to try.”

If only it hadn’t been so early in the morning, if only it hadn’t been desperately pre-coffee, Phil was sure he would have known how to respond to that. It was nearly in his head, just about to come out, if only in some garbled fashion, when the door to the common room below them opened with a bang.

“Cap!” Tony Stark called, sauntering in, looking no more or less rumpled than usual despite the early hour. Bruce Banner was following him, considerably more worn-- which an early transcontinental flight in the company of Stark would do to anyone, Phil suspected. “You’re up! And hey, you let SHIELD into our kitchen! I’m glad you’re playing nice, Steve, but suitless agents before coffee is a little bit much.” He jumped, as if elbowed from behind, and shrugged. Banner ignored him, peeling off to come up the steps and reach around Steve for the fridge, with a muttered “g’morning.”

“You don’t have a kitchen in the guest suite, Tony,” Rogers told him, and Phil set himself back against the counter and watched.

“Well, yeah, we didn’t want to encourage anyone to _live_ there, my God. But, hey,” he snapped around to Phil, “I hear you saved everyone’s butts in DC, anyway.”

“I really didn’t,” Phil said, and Tony waved him off.

“Whatever. Kitchen pass granted. Hand me some of that coffee, will you? Pepper says I have a meeting in… an hour, I think. Oh and hey-- you got a fancy suit yet, Coulson?”

“No.…” Phil tried not to sound bewildered. 

“Get one. There’s a party tomorrow night, a Stark Foundation fundraiser for the Met. I want you there. SHIELDing it up for us,” he looked at Rogers significantly. “ _Everyone_ is gonna be there-- even Ian Quinn.”

“So play nice?” Rogers asked, and Tony snorted.

“One of us has to,” he said, grabbed a mug of coffee from Bruce’s hand, and turned on his heel.

“Evenings and weekends off?” Bruce asked Phil quietly as Stark left the room. Rogers looked over at him.

Phil thought of Clint, already counting down the last hours until he could come home, thought of him splayed out in Phil’s bed, covered by the tree of life quilt, blinking sleepily up at Phil. Thought of Lucky running out to meet him. The little trojan lighthouse and the tie pin with the listening device, already in Skye’s hands, and all the information she was going to want to spill out at their feet at the earliest opportunity.

_Ian Quinn._

Goddamnit.

“I _really_ need a new suit,” he sighed.

 

**Two**

“So do you think he’ll be in, like, fireman clothes when he comes?” Kate asked, and Skye snorted into her coffee. 

“God I hope not,” she said. “I mean, not that I’d mind the view, you know, because they guy’s arms should be bronzed and put on display, but we don’t need all the gay men and straight women in Long Beach Island following him over here, right?” 

Kate stopped and looked around, and Skye wondered if she was also imaging a parade made up of half of the Long Beach Island natives older than about twelve, wandering along behind Clint Barton in fireman’s gear as he passed up the sleepy little street. He was due to meet them soon, just as soon as he finished with the all-day training for the volunteer fire brigade. He’d been introduced to the chief, approved, and signed up all in the space of five minutes, thanks to the human whirlwind that was Doc Halliday. 

It was almost a blessing that the boss hadn’t been able to get away from Avengers Tower Friday night-- Skye wasn’t sure Clint would have shown up at the training ‘till two if he’d been home. Hell, Skye wanted to talk to the boss herself, so badly that she wasn’t sure she’d have let either of them off the island ‘till evening. 

As it was, though, the boss would be coming tonight, and they couldn’t wait any longer to exchange information. They needed Doc Halliday and her intimate island connections and devious old lady mind, too-- which was why Kate and Skye had ended up camped out on her porch, waiting for her to shut up her practice and come join them. Skye’d avoided the rather daunting wicker chairs and neat little tables in favor of curling up against one of the pillars. 

Kate was either apparently not a wicker fan either, or she wanted to be ready to disappear at a moment’s notice-- maybe another effect of the restlessness Skye’d noticed in her from the first night on. Her legs were dangling off the edge of the whitewashed porch, her upper body cuddled into an oversized jacket over a hoodie, and she blew out her bangs in frustration. For once, she didn’t look like a displaced Manhattan socialite. Skye felt a sudden rush of affection for her. 

Skye’d grumbled to Clint in private about him saddling them with Kate Bishop at a time when they already had too many backdoors to close on their websites. Clint had insisted they needed Kate Bishop with them, and Clint had been right. Kate had been the one to think their way out of certain disaster, with the fingerprinting mix-up. Kate had been the one to bring in America Chavez-- and while that worried Skye for a lot of other reasons, damn but that had been an ass-saving move at the time.

Moreover, Kate was keeping Clint out of Skye's increasingly distressed hair. Skye couldn’t be always on North Bar helping now; between waitressing and late nights up studying the scraps of data the trojan lighthouse had managed to pull from SHIELD’s servers, she was swamped already. 

Somehow, she’d ended up the one organizing this mess-- _logistics_ , as the boss had said. And yeah, she was good at this shit, but that didn't mean she had to like it. Fuck SHIELD and Stark Industries, anyway, with all their background checks and biometrics and double checking references and skulking around Gansett Light asking _questions_. Fuck ‘em _hard_.

So thank heavens for Kate Bishop and her bow. She was more than half responsible for keeping Hawkeye from imploding in an excess of nervous energy. (Hell, an excess of frustrated sexual tension, too, probably, but that was _way_ beyond anything Skye wanted to think about. In fact: ew. Even if those arms were…. No. Just… no.) 

Clint was calm enough about his own predicament, even when Skye found him half-buried in do-it-yourself books. But when he got thinking about the boss, and what might be happening to him at Avenger's Tower, he'd start to get wild around the eyes. Once Kate got the bright idea of slapping an arrow in his hand and pushing him off to their little clandestine archery range, he'd stopped twitching quite so much. 

“Might be worth it, just for the view,” Kate was saying, and Skye dragged her attention back to the matter at hand. Well, why not? 

“Speaking of the view,” Skye said, drawing it out, “are you going to be seeing America?” She saw Kate stiffen, and smiled into her cup lid.

“Why?” Kate asked, glaring at Skye from under her bangs. Skye pulled out one of her best innocent smiles.

“Wondering if you were gonna fill her in on the meeting, or if I should when we switch shifts. Or, y’know, if she cares at all about anything ‘cept you.” The wind had picked up a flock of leaves on its way down the street, and slapped one against Kate’s face. She failed to notice it.

“I… I… no, she cares.” When Kate finally found her voice, it came out very small, “I guess. It’s just we… I’m her… main concern. I mean, she came down here to make sure I didn’t get into trouble.”

_Which is why she then helped you help a fugitive hide from an international spy agency. Great plan, Chavez._

“Did you ask her to do that?” she asked instead, trying to feel her way through the minefield without appearing to know it was there. She wouldn’t have asked at all, if America hadn’t come to work the past few days looking exhausted, with darting eyes and twitching reflexes, like she was waiting for the sky to fall, and it _might_ be a good thing when it happened. Though probably not. 

America was part of their conspiracy now, or at least she was adjacent to it. Anyway, she knew who Frank Barney really was, and therefore her continued mental health was important to Skye, and her continued attachment to Kate was important to Skye. The last thing they needed was America pissed off and looking for a way to get back at someone. Anyway, given how stupidly busy her life had become, _having competent shift relief_ was also important to Skye.

“No. She just showed up,” Kate said, picking at a microscopic bit of fluff on her leggings. “I don’t even know where she’s been staying when she’s not… around.”

“Tons of empty beach homes around here,” Skye shrugged, “she could break into a different one a night, and no one’d ever know.”

“Do you think that’s what she does?” There was a weirdly impressed note in Kate’s voice, and Skye struggled not to roll her eyes. It _did_ sound more comfortable than a cot in a van, anyway.

“Does it bug you? That she followed you here just to cramp your style when you're trying to make friends and punch people?” Skye asked by way of changing the subject. America’s housing was _not_ her concern. “I mean, you know, to some people it could seem kinda stalkery.” So Skye’d been told. Then again, Skye’d _also_ been told that she herself sometimes seemed… stalkery. So.

“What?” The suggestion really did seem to take Kate by surprise, which was actually reassuring. A super-strong woman who could somehow cover the distance between the Blue Peter and the marina in less than a minute was not someone you wanted to have turn out to be a little unhinged, too. “No, god, it’s just America. She knows me, she’s just letting me know she’s still here waiting.”

“For what?” 

“For me to jump, I guess,” Kate muttered, and she kicked the shrub at her feet, scattering red leaves everywhere.  
“And _will_ you jump?” 

If Skye was honest with herself-- and despite what some exes (Miles) had said, she did try to be-- she was _enjoying_ this immensely. She wondered if Clint had felt anything like this when he and Tasha the hen were interrogating _her_.

“Dunno.” Kate leaned back against the pillar, closing her eyes tight. Her voice was just a whisper. “It’s weird.”

“Well, yeah, she followed you here.”

“No, I mean… it’s weird. For me. To think about. Because I’m straight. Right? I mean, I’d be part of that damn Hawkeye Arm Porn Appreciation parade any day of the week and twice on Sundays. But.” Her forehead twisted, like she was concentrating on pinning down something skittering around in her brain. (Or maybe pants.) And then slowly she dropped her head into her hands and groaned. “But she’s _so_....”

“Hot,” Skye said, and Kate shot upright and glared at her. “Hey, I can't help noticing these things. So what, though? If she’s hot, if you like her like she _really clearly_ likes you, what’s wrong? So you’re straight-- whatever. Not like you’d be the first straight girl to kiss another girl.”

“And _mean_ it?” Kate asked her. “I mean, don’t I have to, like, give up my straight card if I fall in love with a girl?”

Skye wondered if Kate could even hear herself at the moment. Probably not, or else she'd _really_ be freaking out. 

“Does the card mean that much to you?” It was mostly a rhetorical question-- if Kate'd been freaked out by gay stuff in general she'd have run screaming about the third time Clint'd said the boss's name and followed it up with a pathetic sigh.

“Not so much that, it’s just… it’s what I’ve always _been_ , you know? Wouldn't it be hard for you to realize you maybe weren't who you'd always thought you were?” 

“I am not your best example,” Skye told her. 

_Now_ she remembered why she didn’t talk about shit like this around her peers (well, apart from the fact that most of her peers were hackers and she spoke to them mostly online-- they could have been hyperintelligent dogs for all she knew about them). It made her head hurt. 

“I’m just kind of a people are people person," Skye said, "and some people are hot, and I take it from there. But Kate, c’mon. If you want her, go tell her that, because… well, because seriously, you just dragged her into the middle of a conspiracy that could land her with… I don’t know, with treason charges. And she didn’t even hesitate, she just jumped. You can’t put her in jeopardy like that without letting her know where she stands.”

“Arg,” Kate said, and turned to glare down the street… then down at Skye… and then back at the decorative birdhouse sitting on one of the low glass tables on the porch. When she spoke again, she was addressing the birdhouse. “I was just trying to help, that was all. Just trying to… _do_ something I could be proud of. I didn’t ask her to chase me, I didn’t ask her to follow me down here, and I didn't-- okay, I _did_ ask her to risk her neck with me. In my defense, I mean… what choice did I have? And when, can I just ask, _when_ did the world become messed up enough that the only people an actual _Avenger_ has to help blow up some weird tangly conspiracy are you, me, an old lady veterinarian, a bar keep, and some insane hermit dude who ends up being a scary ex-soldier and who leaves everyone in the lurch to go undercover?”

“Put that way, sounds kind of crazy,” Skye said, and let the conversation be turned. She’d put the bug up Kate’s butt, anyway, and what-- who-- Kate did with it was up to her. “And speaking of the boss, I am going out of my mind.”

“What’s up?” Kate asked, and plopped back down on the porch, suddenly much more at ease. “No luck on the computery stuff you were doing?” She waved a vague hand in the air at the ‘computery stuff.’ Skye would have snorted if she hadn't already been so used to it.

“Minimal luck. I'm an idiot, I know, but I was hoping it’d be easy-- that there’d be, like, Agent Joe Schmoe who happened to log in every single place Hawkeye was, at the same times, and, like, conveniently be someone whose girl Hawkeye’d slept with. Or whose boy he'd slept with. Whatever. Anyway… I hoped but I didn't expect it. But this? It’s not looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s looking for a bunch of needle-like spaces in part of a haystack, only I’m not sure if there are other haystacks out there that might also have had needles at some point. And I’d farm it out to my Rising Tide contacts, but I can’t _trust_ them right now-- I don’t know which of them are helping Quinn! I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels here.”

Meanwhile, the boss was still stuck at Avenger's Tower, and every passing day made it more likely Clint'd accidentally blow his cover.

“Huh.” Kate tilted her head one way, than another. “Yeah, that sucks all right. So… maybe attack from a different angle? What about Quinn?”

“What _about_ him?” Skye groaned. “I’ve barely thought about him. I've been spending all my time on this SHIELD stuff, and it’s driving me crazy. I can’t figure out what he’s doing with those crates. There’s some hinky stuff in them, sure, but nothing you couldn’t smuggle without getting your own hands dirty, right? So why the hell was he so worried about them that he tried to _kill Clint_?”

“Hrmph,” Kate said. She was back to picking at the lint on her knee, and Skye found it horribly distracting. She stood up and started pacing in Kate’s place, but that only made her more restless. The porch was so damn neat and domestic, it felt like being trapped in a birdcage. Or a dollhouse. Or maybe Skye just didn't do Victorian-- the big, falling-apart house on North Bar gave her a similar sense of the pricklies. Looking around for a distraction, Skye practically backed into a white wicker chair with a back like a throne and a base shaped like a fat hourglass. 

“Hrmph,” Kate said again. She had moved on from lint-picking to stripping the leaves off of the bush at her feet. Skye briefly contemplated grabbing the palm frond-printed cushion off the chair and whapping Kate over the head with it. Maybe that would make the thoughts tumble out. _Or maybe I should sit on my hands. Jeez, Skye, don't take your own frustration out on people you're gonna need._

“Huh,” Kate said finally, and looked up. Skye whipped her hands behind her back and clasped them tight. “You know what’s _really_ weird? Quinn gets seasick easily. I remember Dad laughing about it, after one boating party."

"Yeah, so?" Okay, clearly Kate was going somewhere, but clearly too she was gonna take the scenic route. Time to settle in. The chair creaked ominously as Skye sat down, wicker settling around her, and she braced her feet against the floor. _The Doc probably puts people she wants to torture in this. I would._ She should get up. Probably. Kate was still speaking, though, and Skye tried to divide her attention between extricating herself from the chair, and listening.

"So what the hell was he even doing on the yacht? He’d want to be far away as possible, right?” Kate looked up at her now and waved a leaf as she spoke.

“Right,” Skye said, trying to tilt forward. Her hips were stuck. What the hell? How did grown adults sit in this thing? It was a quaint little death trap was what it was. She wriggled.

“So,” Kate was looking past her now, leaf forgotten in her half-raised hand, like she was holding up a flag. She’d sighted prey in the distance, Skye could tell, and she felt her heart rate kick up. 

Kate's eyes narrowed, her entire body tensed like was about to strike. Skye leaned forward further. 

“So," Kate drew it out, testing the thought as it came out of her mouth. "So he has to be _there_ , yes?"

"Yeah," Skye said, breathless, because she'd caught sight of it too, now, shimmering on the horizon. 

"Meaning maybe it’s not what’s _on_ the yacht that's so special." They were staring at each other now, and Skye saw the excitement spark in Kate's eyes, realized Kate was searching her own, bubbling when she realized she'd gotten to the prize before Skye had. 

"It’s where he’s _taking it,_ ” she said.

“Holy _shit_ ” Skye said, and jumped straight up.

Or tried to.

The chair came with her for a half foot before thumping back down, falling over, and rolling halfway off the porch.

Neither she nor Kate gave a fuck. They were both too busy grinning at each other.

 

**Three**

 

America was back outside her window. 

America was back outside her window, standing there in the dark, star flashing on her wrist like a signal. _One if by land, Two if by sea? If two… does she have another one somewhere_? She melted into the shadow of the dock, and her legs-- despite the growing chill-- were long and bare and brown as the pilings themselves, rooted equally into the sand.

Kate watched her watching the window for what might have been as long as a lifetime, but was probably much more like five minutes. The light was on in her room, the curtains closed. Much of the rest of the house was dark-- over on the land side of the house, where the second floor formed its flattened bulgy base for the tower-- a little flicker of blue light would show Cousin Emily watching television. (Kate couldn’t _see_ that of course, but she knew what Emily was doing. The sound drifted faintly up the open glass stairway.)

Out here, on the sand, America stood just outside the light and looked up. Her eyes closed once, and she sighed, and curled herself more closely inside her hoodie.

Kate shifted inside her own jacket, which was barely thick enough to keep goosebumps from popping out all over her skin-- or the other things trying to pop out, too. Perhaps… perhaps pajamas weren’t quite warm enough attire for the night. 

_Well, go get warm then._

“Come here often?” she asked, stepping out from the Trashcan's long shadow into the thin stream of light. 

The look on America’s face would have satisfied even the most exacting of soap opera fans. Kate bit her lip to keep from kissing it right off her. 

“Once in a while,” America said, clearing her voice and crossing her arms directly under her breasts. She uncrossed them quickly (to Kate's probably poorly-hidden dismay), put her hands on her hips, then dropped them.

“Some people would call that kinda stalkery, you know.” There were maybe five feet between them. The sand was soft, rolling under Kate’s feet as she closed the distance by a step.

“‘Some people’ who?”

“Skye,” Kate shrugged, and closed another step. America straightened, braced herself even, chin up and eyes dark as the night sky behind her.

“Not you?”

“Not… really,” Kate said, taking her time about it, making sure she truly meant it before it came out. “You’d go if I asked you to.” She got a head tilt, America agreeing, but she hadn’t really needed it. She knew this about America as clearly as she knew her own draw weight and stance-- that America pushed, but she never shoved. And never pulled. “Must get lonely down here; why don’t you ever ask to come in?”

“Oh come on, Kate, like your cousin wants me around. I’ll stay out here.” 

Well, she had to admit that was true enough-- not that Emily knew America existed, at least in relation to Kate. But if she _did_ find out, America definitely counted under the Bad Influences category that Emily was currently protecting Kate from while eating and shopping Kate’s Dad out of house and home and giving herself a different manicure every day.

Kate bit her lip and looked America over once more, at the sheer amazingness of her. She was strong all through, curves and grace and power like Kate’s best bow. _I called her a superhero. What an understatement._

“Can I keep you company?” she asked, and closed the distance between them. America’d gone entirely still, face glowing in the reflected light, stars in her eyes and stars on her wrist. _God I want to go hunting and find out if she's got another one hidden somewhere._

“If you want, Princess,” America breathed, and Kate settled in beside her, turned, looked up at the window, and crossed her arms. Yellow light shone behind a motionless gauze curtain. 

_Hawkeye’d make that shot._

“You know what?” Kate said after a while, and looked over her shoulder to find America still gazing back at her. “I never did like ‘Princess.’”

“What _do_ you like?” America asked, and Kate took the opportunity that her lips, parted on the last syllable, presented. She reached out, cupped her palms around the warm smooth planes of America’s jaw, tangled fingers in her hair, and kissed her.

The sand beneath her feet was dry and yielding, and so was America’s mouth under hers. The first suck of her lower lip immediately became Kate’s favorite treat, twice as decadent as Cherry Garcia. She’d expected, really, more dissonance than this, more unease at the first time she pressed in to embrace someone else with breasts. The random piece of her brain that usually plotted trajectories and checked wind speed and direction was babbling about calculating the right angle to make sure Kate’s own small chest avoided squashing America’s considerably more generous endowment up to her chin.

The rest of her, though, was so damn caught up in the moment, in the breeze against her knees and America’s hair _finally_ under her fingers and her lip between Kate’s teeth, that she actually forgot to check whether America was kissing back.

Which, thank everything, America did eventually manage to do, with a sexy little growl that set Kate’s knees shaking. She also, eventually, placed her hands on Kate’s shoulders and disentangled them.

“ _Kate_?” she breathed.

“Yes.” Kate wondered if it was the lack of oxygen making her so giddy, the height of the Milky Way above them, or just life in general. “I like that much better. I... also kinda like ‘chica,’ honestly.”

“But not ‘Princess,’ huh?” A slow smile was drawing across America’s face, and she glanced up at the empty window a last time. Kate looked up, too.

“Nah. Gets way too lonely, waiting around in a tower and doing nothing.”

 

**Four**

 

“ _She doesn’t move. Her size and weight are not at first especially employed. Yet here is the message she sends up the line: if this isn’t bedrock, you’d be better off if it were; if you’re in a hurry, get out your scissors. She stays low and holds_ \-- and I’m reading about _fishing_ , Luck.” Clint flipped the tattered book closed, and flipped it away from him. It landed on the leather seat of the sofa with a little _plump_ , and Lucky watched it go, then turned back to where Clint was scrubbing his face with his hands.

“I’m reading about shad fishing and it’s making me miss Nat,” he groaned. In the low lamplight, Lucky’s fur glowed red as Clint cuddled into it. “Does he really read this stuff, Phil? He does, doesn’t he? Grant’s memoirs and Dumas and a history of cod and the company history of the Howling Commandos? I mean….” What _did_ he mean, really? That Phil was brilliant, that Phil slipped in and out with ease through layers of masculinity Clint’d never managed to get an invitation into? That Clint couldn’t even quite put a name to? And even if so… why the hell did it matter?

Clint trailed off and looked around the den. He hadn’t lit a fire-- after the day he’d had it was the last thing he felt like seeing again. His one concession to coziness had been to get out the oil lamps and light two, while he and Lucky cuddled up at the end of their day and waited for Phil to come home.

His body was already reminding him that the volunteer fire training was the hardest he’d used it since he’d fallen off of Quinn’s boat. Now his mind was threatening to rebel, lulled into somnolence by the lamplight and the warm dog, the gentle creaking lullaby of the house, the cadence of the words he was reading. 

Giving up and going to bed, though, was not an option. Not with Phil out on the road somewhere, having finally removed the last sucking tendrils of whichever Avenger or SHIELD agent was trying to keep him from getting back to Clint. Maybe he’d loosened that tie, or even removed it entirely, revealing hints of that devastating collarbone Clint’d only just begun to be allowed to appreciate. Maybe even now he was getting out of the car down at the marina, stretching the kinks out of his legs, and striding down the dock where Lola was tied and waiting to bring him home.

It was past midnight by the clock. Clint needed to be up early in the morning to make up for the lost time in fire training. He’d discovered, this last week, that he didn’t have half Phil’s efficiency around North Bar. His general competence with his hands got him by most times, and a combination of google, guessing, and a general willingness to let the chips fall where they might took care of the rest. So the island was being taken care of, sure, but he ended each night exhausted. 

At least, though, he had company. Skye sometimes, Lucky most of the time, and Kate at least once a day down at the stumps, where they took turns with her bow and he teased her and she snarked back. Even America once, watching from a distance as he and Kate shot. And the chickens, when he was in the yard. There was at least one hen following his steps at all times, and Tasha had taken to trailing him closely.

Beyond that, and increasingly, he felt like Phil was walking with him-- or maybe it was North Bar itself, keeping him company with rustles in the bushes and warm sun on the back of his neck, the crash of waves against the dune just when he needed to hear something other than his own voice. Maybe he was settling a little into the life, even with Phil gone away, wandering through the Tower where Clint used to walk.

Phil, who got to see Nat every day now. When they had their evening call, Clint playing Frank Barney the novice keeper cousin to the best of his ability, Phil at least had the grace to try and fill him in a little on the Avengers, under cover of his own settling in. It was good to hear about them all, to laugh at Phil’s constant undeclared sniping contest with Steve, to tell Phil where May liked best for lunch, and how Bruce actually did yoga sometimes just to get Tony to leave him alone, when Tony was too captivated by the visions in his own mind to realize that he needed to stop _nattering_.

Phil, who should be _here_ right now, and who should be up with Clint in the bed under the eaves, making good use of the box of condoms, slipping along underneath him, above him, glowing in the-- 

Phil who was calling him right _now_ , apparently. 

“Hey,” he said, picking up, and trying to force his voice back from the rough edge of desire. “Where are you?”

“Still at the Tower,” Phil said, and his voice made the whole room warm, despite the way the words hulled Clint, “I was just about to leave this afternoon when Agent Hand got sick. _Very_ sick.” From the sound of it, Phil’s face must be radiating disgust, and Clint was pretty sure he didn’t want to know just how many bodily fluids poor old Victoria Hand had to be leaking, for that to happen. 

“So… you’re stuck there tonight?” His stomach was sinking, and Clint just sat there and tried not to let too much of the disappointment seep through the phone line. Lucky whined.

“The whole weekend, I think. I tried to get coverage, I really did. Fury says Agent Amador was Hand’s backup, and she’s not allowed within a mile of the Tower right now-- Stark did something… rash. I asked May. She just rolled her eyes at me and walked away. At least I get a chance to talk to you? I’m sorry I’m letting you know so late-- I didn’t want to give up.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Clint said, rising and stretching. “You can’t leave those guys all on their own; you do that and next thing you know they’ve broken Cleveland. Don’t worry about us; we’re all tucked in and doing fine. Luck and I were just checking out your bookshelf; I was reading him that John McPhee you seemed to like. The shad one.”

“Founding Fish? I read that to put me to sleep. It’s not…. I don’t really…. I didn’t think it would interest you.” Phil’s voice sounded uncertain, like he wasn’t sure how to take Clint’s words, and Clint blinked. He hadn’t sounded mocking, or anything, had he? 

“No, I like it all right,” he assured Phil. “Feels right for the place, somehow. And it just reminds me of… I dunno. Eh. Forget it, you’re on the line now. Talk to me. How’s Hand doing?”

“I’m assured that it wasn’t something catching. I’ve been assured that _very_ vehemently by several people. A couple of them muttered ‘thank God’ under their breath.”

“Food poisoning maybe?” Clint leaned over to blow out the lamps, one by one.

“Very possibly. Stark immediately had JARVIS check all the video feeds, to make sure he hadn’t shared anything she’d eaten at the party. I… is it weak if I admit I checked too?” Phil was rustling around now, probably in his room. Would he actually strip down to pajamas, or was he planning on sleeping in his suit, just in case the call to Assemble came during the night? And if so, what about that tie?

Clint tried to come up with a way to ask about the tie. It took him long enough that Phil’s rustling stopped, and turned into an interrogative “Frank?”

“Yeah… no. Not weak at all. I would be too. Yay for no bad shellfish. How _was_ the party? You meet all the bright stars of Stark’s circle?” That was the only reason Clint hadn’t pouted openly when Phil said he’d be staying in town Friday night. If there was a chance he could meet Quinn in a neutral setting, maybe he could… well who knew what he could do. Get _some_ kind of read on the guy, Clint had hoped. 

“Most of them. I get the feeling I was mostly there to buffer Captain Rogers and Ms. Romanov from Ian Quinn. There seems to be some bad feeling there, relating back to when Hawkeye first went missing. No one was willing to give me details. Stark just let me know I couldn’t, on any account, let them near Quinn.”

“Is that in the job description?” Clint asked, while trying desperately to figure out what _Natasha_ might have done to get herself banished from Quinn’s sight. (Steve was easy enough to puzzle out-- it was probably less what he _had_ done than what he _would_ do, given half a chance. Clint would have appreciated it more had it not meant that Phil apparently hadn’t been able to get a read on the one person he’d stayed to see.)  
“That is _not_ in the job description,” Phil grumbled. “At least Ms. Romanov is a very engaging companion.”

“And Captain America’s good for eye candy?” Clint said, and grinned to himself as Phil spluttered. He stood in the dark, with a mutt waiting patiently at his side, and closed his eyes, imagining Phil there with him.

“That… there is that. We were allowed to talk to most of the _other_ guests, though. I got talked at for about fifteen minutes by a good friend of Quinn’s, though-- Derek Bishop.”

“Quite the popular guy you are. Was he nerving himself up to ask you for a dance, or was he more interested in, um, engaging the Black Widow?”

“Neither. We have a mutual acquaintance. Well-- our acquaintance, his daughter. Kate, if you remember her. When he found out I came from North Bar, he suddenly became very interested. He said she went down there to, um, recover from a nervous breakdown, I think. If you read between the lines.”

 _Recover from a nervous breakdown_ Clint thought, and snorted. Yeah, maybe her _father’s_ nervous breakdown. Katie-Kate had nerves stable as the Rockies.

“You tell him she hates you?” 

“I did _not_ ,” Phil said, and there was a thump, followed by a grunt and another thump. Both shoes coming off, probably. Followed by socks? Clint hadn’t had _nearly_ enough time to explore Phil’s feet yet. Wasn’t even sure if they were hairy as the rest of him, or if they’d be smooth-grained, strong, toes as long as….

 _Stop that train of thought right_ now _, Barton._ Phil was still talking.

“... didn’t seem fair, when he was threatening to send her to Sweetbriar if she didn’t lay low.”

“Sweetbriar?” Clint asked, uncertain. From the context, it sounded like some kind of low-security rich-girl prison, but the name was all wrong.

“Finishing school,” Phil explained. So Clint hadn’t been far off.

“Well,” he said, keeping his tone light as possible, “she and me, we’re buds now. She’s _well_ taken care of down here. Probably won’t even bite your head off, next time you see her.”

“Yeah?” Phil said, and his voice held a weak little upswing on the last syllable, trying to find some kind of hope. “Sounds good to me. Last night was exhausting, and this weekend won’t be much better. It’s going to be a long week, I think.”

“Well, North Bar’ll be here waiting for you next weekend, too.” Clint put all the warmth he could dredge up from his heart into the sentence.

“Yes,” Clint could _hear_ Phil straighten up in his voice, “Next weekend for sure.”

He took one last look around the den and nodded his goodnight at the cottage. As he headed for his bedroom, trailing Lucky, he listened to Phil’s voice and the gentle thump of the wind outside the windows, equally. 

**Five**

There was laughter coming from Coulson’s room; helpless genuine little chuckles, the kind that were usually accompanied by huge grins. She bet this one was, too, which was the truly odd thing about it. Coulson never grinned, never gave more than that little half-cocked smile that could mean he found something funny but could also mean he’d just put one over on you, or he had gas.

For someone who’d been, in the words of Tony Stark, “haunting a nearly deserted island like he was just waiting to be made into a Lifetime special” for the last decade and a half, it was impressive. He’d slipped into his liaison role like someone to the mild-manner born. 

Natasha had watched how he wooed them all since he came. 

Stark was still more than half convinced that Coulson was Fury’s way of insulting the Avengers, but he listened to Pepper and Pepper approved. He also had something of a shock, along mid-way through the second week, when War Machine landed on his balcony, the way he often did. He’d shelled himself and come inside, collapsing back down into Col. Jim Rhodes and already grumping at Tony about being late for burgers in that one place upstate-- and then stopped still, blinked, and looked past Tony to where Phil Coulson was standing near the bar, gathering some last files before disappearing for the day. 

“ _Cheese?_ ” Rhodes had said, face splitting into a grin.

He laughed out loud as Coulson came forward to shake his hand with a murmured “I see they finally gave in and gave you wings, Colonel.”

Coulson, as it transpired, had met Rhodey in the first Gulf War. (Natasha was beginning to wonder if there was anyone he _hadn’t_ met in his previous life.)

With the two people he trusted most coming down on Coulson’s side, it was inevitable that even Tony was starting to crack. He still didn’t _trust_ Coulson completely, but he was starting to _like_ him a little.

Steve had gone from disapproving to benignly skeptical, which was the way Steve mostly was with Fury’s projects. Whatever Coulson had said to him in the wake of their mission against Carl Creel, it had made more of an impression on Steve than Natasha thought he realized. (Coulson’s poker face was getting better as well, but on more than one occasion, Natasha caught him frozen like a rabbit after Steve turned his back-- he clearly couldn’t believe he’d just sassed a living piece of Americana and gotten away with it. He kept on doing it though, like it was a reflex he couldn't control.)

Coulson was slowly winning Bruce over simply by giving him space and trusting him to know the Hulk’s capabilities. He took his cue there from Stark, though in a much quieter manner. They hadn’t talked much, but when they did they both came away licking cream from their whiskers.

Still-- Bruce tried to get along with everyone, and so did Coulson. Natasha suspected that they both just enjoyed how contained the other was.

Thor, now, Thor was funny one; Natasha had watched closely how he’d handled Thor. There was deference there, unexpectedly, but also a hint of matter of fact firmness under the good humor. It _worked_ , too. Thor’s initial distrust had faded into pleased surprise at being treated neither as a god nor as if all he had to offer was brawn, blonde, and Mjolnir. He adopted Coulson quickly, much as Natasha imagined he would have a chancellor or advisor back on Asgard: with grace, good humor, and a little bit of distance.

Which was, which _must_ be, exactly how Coulson had planned it.

Good god, that man would have made a _spy_ , Natasha had thought to herself. No wonder Nick had been so quick to push him at them, despite that decade and a half of reclusiveness.

Of course, Coulson’d noticed her noticing, seen her watching. Not that he ever acknowledged it with more than a single twitch of his lips or a slight intensifying of the twinkle in his eye. _And he knows he’s winning me over with it. To each their own sort of bait._

The reclusiveness certainly made itself felt in the evenings, when Coulson would disappear to his bedroom, as he had now. He was polite, he was gracious, and he was firm-- especially after the debacle over the weekend: he was off-duty unless the team was called out in the evenings, and he would spend them as he saw fit. 

Which was exactly why Natasha was in front of his door now, planning on poking around the edges of that boundary-- before Tony got around to it, and perhaps caused a huge mess.

Coulson was still chuckling, half-muffled, and there was a soft little scrape from the room-- a chair being pulled out. The creak of him sinking into it. More laughter, and a soft sigh. It was a listening sort of sigh; he must be on his phone.

“Yeah, yeah, she’s just broody-- she’s trying to hatch them.” he was saying through his chuckles. Natasha blinked. 

The pause, while whoever was on the other end spoke, was long enough for her to settle into a faux-casual lean against the wall next to his door.

“No,” he said next, “Of course not. Do you see a rooster in there? It’s… well you can mostly tell because we don’t get woken up at the crack of dawn…. I don’t think she’ll be good for much for a while. You’re just going to have to survive on an inadequate breakfast. No. No, goddamnit, if you short Lucky I swear you’ll regret it.” He was still half-laughing as he made the threat, and Natasha settled in. The dog she knew about; this must be someone from the island.

Which pretty much meant it was the Convenient Cousin, as she called him in her head. 

“Yes, well, maybe I’ll just stop in the middle, did _that_ occur to you?” 

Was that a chip on her fingernails?

“No, no, don’t let her, my god. Well, there must be _some_ way to stop her. I don’t know… maybe you should lock her in a closet with that waitress. No, wait, I didn’t mean that literally-- no. Babe. No, you-- yes. Yeah, I did. Is that okay? Oh. Oh. Well…. God. Yeah, I’ll… yeah I’ll be home soon. Only a couple of days now.”

Okay, maybe it _wasn’t_ the cousin. Intriguing. 

A someone special back on the shore would explain why Coulson was so adamant about his days off. (Not that he was wrong-- they could all handle Victoria Hand and her high-level snark for a day or two each week without the world ending. And burnout could happen _fast_ on the Avengers watch.) He’d moped badly when he’d been forced to stay in New York while Hand was puking her guts out; Natasha had put it down at the time to worry about the state he’d left North Bar in. This made much more sense, but Pepper didn’t seem to know about a someone special-- and Pepper knew nearly as much as Nick Fury about anything that was worth knowing.

“No, that’ll happen at high tide, you just need to make sure the painter’s long enough so that you don’t get stuck again. What did you do, swim? Geez, are you sure you’re oka-- look, I worry is all. If you drown there’s no-one to watch the estate.”

No, that was _definitely_ the cousin. Or, maybe properly “cousin,” oh please let it be cousin-with-quotes. 

“I think it’s going pretty well? Yes, I know you do, and I appreciate that. Right, yes, I did-- got lost trying to take the elevator back, though. Yeah, no, I figured that out after the third wrong turn, when JARVIS finally volunteered to show me the way back…. I feel like I’ll finally get this all worked out, just in time to leave for good.”

Wait… 

What?

Natasha sat up straighter.

“Are you really worrying about that? Look, just trim her butt feathers a little and give her a good wash. _This_ is what you consider gross? Really? Just be glad it’s not vent gleet!”

She stayed to the very end, but apart from a certain reluctance to say goodbye that confirmed her opinion that Coulson's conversational partner wasn’t just a cousin, all the more Natasha gleaned from her eavesdropping was that chicken keeping was a much more complex affair than she’d previously thought. And that she liked the sound of Coulson’s laugh much more than she should. 

If she decided then and there that she was going to have to hear more of that laugh, however, it wasn’t because it was so rare. 

It was because he’d just made it clear he considered this a very temporary job, when all his patient overtures to the team indicated the very opposite. There was a hidden agenda somewhere, either Fury’s or his. She couldn’t afford to let it stay that way, and she was beginning to think the cousin held the key to the riddle.

She just hoped she was going to like the answer when she found it. 

It was such a _nice_ laugh.

Natasha debated turning away instead of knocking on the door. It seemed only fair to let Coulson have one last ounce of privacy in which to be happy, before she started to dig. She was just shifting on her feet when something glass shattered, somewhere in Coulson's room. He began to cough, just a rasp or two at first, then a series of choking hacks. That decided things _very_ quickly.

She nearly tore the door off its hinges, opening it.

The inside of his room was quickly filling with a thick, bluish gas. Natasha shoved the door shut again, and tore her blouse off. 

“JARVIS! You getting this? Kill the vents, flush the system!” she yelled, somewhat muffled by the end as she tightened the blouse around her face and pushed back inside.

"I already am," JARVIS said, and if an AI could sound testy, he certainly did. She didn't care-- it wasn't happening fast enough. Oh for the industrial-sized fans that shook the laboratories several levels down.

The room was almost entirely opaque now, roiling with gas, and she dropped to the floor. There he was-- scooting towards her while flat against the carpet, his undershirt pulled up over his nose. He was slowing down already; she crawled forward to meet him, hooked an arm around his clammy shoulders, and started to shimmy out. 

She backed right into Tony’s armor-clad legs.

He pulled Coulson from her arms and tossed him at Bruce, before stomping inside and slamming the door. An emergency hatch dropped behind it and sealed with a _snk_ , and Natasha briefly blessed the security precautions Tony’d built in to the room. Dear, paranoid Tony.

Bruce was already fitting an oxygen mask to Coulson’s face. Natasha felt her own lungs unclench as he took a deep breath, then another.

“Nat?” Steve said, his voice tight. She looked up to find him crouched over her, holding out another mask.

“I’m okay,” she rasped back at him, then pushed to her feet. “But what the hell was that?”

“I don’t know." Steve worked his jaw like a horse who was considering bridling, if not outright spooking and galloping off. “But I don’t think that was a random accident with the HVAC. That was an attack.”

Coulson was still lying limply in Bruce’s lap. He was conscious, at least, and blinked up at the ceiling like he was seeing ghosts. _Hopefully that is not actually the case._

“Not arguing that one,” Natasha said to Steve, rubbing her palm over the back of her neck. “But who was it aimed at?”

_And who’s going to tell his ‘cousin’ he’s not coming home this weekend, either?_

\----

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Phil can't have visitors, Clint has too many, Skye wants to pay a visit, and the past does pay a visit. 
> 
> I wanted this one up before now but eh, it's still Sunday in my time zone-- and I contend that waking up to a preschooler puking on you excuses much. (I can hear Agent Hand cackling vengefully in my head.)


	15. Becalmed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil can't have visitors, but that isn’t stopping anyone. Clint has entirely too many visitors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory Chicken Note: warning for chickens with digestive problems, and chickens as objects of transference.

**One**

Natasha sat with the cell phone in her hand for several minutes, flipping it end over end, getting her thumbnail down into the worn areas where the hard shell of the case had taken damage, before she made her decision. Even then, she looked through the glass into the quarantine ward one last time. Coulson was lying on a hospital bed, a small figure in the middle of a forest of steel trees and IV bags, chalk-white and snoring, looking like he was planning to sleep a thousand years.

That outcome was not, she had been assured, at all likely. The worst was over, he'd live, he'd wake up, he'd play the violin again (assuming he ever had)-- in short, he'd do all the things doctors liked to use to reassure people who hovered at patient bedsides looking fraught.

Which meant that although time seemed to stretch before her like taffy at the moment, she had to move fast. 

Coulson would probably consider it a gross violation of privacy. Pepper, or some other Stark Industries employee, should be making the call, if it was a strictly business one. Fury should make it if it was a family call. But she’d _happened_ to be there when he was attacked, she would say, if challenged. Given the circumstances, who knew how long the official channels would wait before letting him know?

Meanwhile, the chaos that had followed Coulson’s attack gave her a certain amount of solitude and cover. Tony and Bruce were too busy sweeping the Tower from top to bottom in a search for answers, and Thor and Sam had their hands full keeping Steve from saying something regrettable to Director Fury. Fury had been in and out a half dozen times to glance at Coulson, the stormclouds gathering a little more thickly at his coattails each time. Steve paced back and forth in the hallway behind Natasha, muttering.

Had either of them even noticed it was the first time since Hawkeye leapt from a window that Steve’d voluntarily come to SHIELD?

Natasha wasn’t sure-- wasn’t sure Steve even knew he was in SHIELD at all, the way an angry haze had spread over him when Fury’d trumped his demand to keep Coulson at the Tower for observation with:

“So he can be _attacked_ in his own room again? He’s an employee of SHIELD, he’s coming to SHIELD, and I am keeping him _safe_.”

They were still sorting it out.

Probably the only reason Steve and Fury hadn’t parted brass rags right there was that Steve’d seen Tony’s face when he came out of Coulson’s Tower bedroom and flipped up his helmet. Tony'd looked violated, honestly, and Natasha had to find another place to look as he glanced at Steve.

“I don’t know what happened,” he’d said. “It came out of one of the vents… I don’t know yet if we’re safe.”

Tony being Tony, he’d know by noon.

Steve being Steve, he’d stop looking like a thoroughbred on steroids as soon as the fact Coulson would recover had fully filtered through his anger. Thor was even now handing him a vending machine sandwich with a sympathetic smile. Food was always the way past his defenses.

Left to her own devices, Natasha would be Natasha. Coulson had hooked her, but she wasn't going to be reeled quietly in. If she was going, she was going to know exactly what she was getting into-- and for this brief moment she had a chance to test the waters.

She walked away from the sterile halls outside medical, rumbled down in the sleek steel and glass elevators, wandered out past the guards at the front door and along the block, moving with an unhurried stride, until she ducked into the vestibule of a nearby skyscraper. It was one she and Clint had used to meet at when they were in town, in order to talk quietly and semi-anonymously. Close enough to SHIELD not to be missed too long, far enough away that the halo of security was somewhat abated. 

Muttering a half-apology to Coulson for the intrusion into his private life-- always assuming he deserved it-- she dialed the number.

It rang only twice before someone answered, seemingly already midway through a conversation.

“You’re calling late. Half expected to see the team on the news. Look, I’m still worried about Cousin Emily-- did you see the picture? Does that look normal to you?”

Well, whatever she’d expected, that wasn-- actually, that was exactly what she _should_ have expected, she supposed, given the conversation she’d overheard.

“I’m sorry,” Natasha found herself saying, and she sat on one of the long low benches that ran through a secluded corner of the lobby, between several oversized aspidistras in large brushed-metal pots. It was her favorite spot; hidden yet open-- today, it was just making her feel hollow.

“Gleek,” said Frank Barney, on the other end of the line, and then was silent for a while. The background noise from his phone was more telling: a series of clucks, scuffles, then echoing footsteps and the swish-thud of a screen door, followed by a creak. “Na-- not Phil, are you?”

“No,” she said, and added gently, “the good news is the doctors say he’ll be fine soon.”

Another long pause, then a sigh, and something that sounded like a sad little snort of a laugh.

“That’s the good news, is it?” His voice was a little higher than she’d expected, somehow, a light tenor, slow and drawling. “I assume the bad news has to do with why some nurse lady’s callin’ me on his phone and tellin’ me what the doctors said?”

“I prefer ‘Natasha’ to ‘lady,’” she told him, and ran one hand down an aspidistra. “And I’m the Black Widow, not ‘some nurse.’ I’m afraid Agent Coulson was exposed to an unknown toxin last night in his room at Avenger’s Tower. We were able to rescue him, and he’s in SHIELD’s biocontainment unit right now.”

“ _Biocontainment?_ You mean... quarantine? What the-- has he gone radioactive or somethin’? Why's he quarantined? What’s _wrong_ with him?” Frank Barney’s voice hit the upper registers, and Natasha winced. _What do you think you're going to get from this?_ She wasn't sure whose the voice in her head was-- Clint's, Coulson's, Steve's, or her own. 

In the end, though, it didn't matter. She'd started the hare, she was going to chase it down.

“I’m sorry,” she said again-- and she was, mostly-- “but that’s classified.”

\----

“Classified,” Clint said, and bit back the growl that was threatening to keep out his throat. Damn Natasha and damn her little games-- and he was quite sure it _was_ a game. She must have picked up something from Phil’s demeanor that made her curious about the Cousin At Home, since she normally cut to the chase on calls like these. But no, no chase-cutting today; just a leisurely meander. He knew how she worked; she was trying to rile him up. 

_Just the accent, let’s leave the vocabulary alone, Clint ol’ buddy. Keep it simple._

“I can tell you it was airborne, and that as far as the doctors can tell, its unlikely to be contagious. However, given the volatile nature of the… toxins… involved, they do want to keep him isolated for observation, just until we can be sure.” 

"That's not reassurin', Natasha. Darnit all, can't you tell me anythin' about this 'airborne toxin' whatever? I mean, are we talkin' mustard gas here, or just the equivalent of standin' next to a cow's behind? What d'you need to be sure of? He ain't goin' to turn green an' grow three more feet, is he?" 

Clint looked around for something to keep him from either throwing the phone to the floor or giving himself up, so that Nat would stop her fishing and just _tell_ him already. It didn't help that the sound of her voice made him want to whimper and try for a hug over the phone. Maybe it was Phil being gone, or maybe it was the gaggle of young women suddenly following him about, or maybe it was just that he could only repress for so long, but _damn_ he missed Natasha.

He found the coffee press, grounds still in it from his morning dose, and began to clean it out. Any idle task would have done-- he just needed something, anything, to stop himself from forming the words “Nat, it’s me.”

If he _did_ do something to let her know who he was, he was fairly sure she was going to forget to tell him about Phil entirely.

Plus.

Phil'd been "exposed to an unknown toxin" in _Avengers Tower_ of all places, and if the Tower wasn’t secure, what the hell was? Quinn's bugs were tiny and ubiquitous. Skye grew increasingly impressed with their complexity the more she studied them-- and he was only the _known_ antagonist. No way was Clint risking the possibility someone was listening in on this conversation. Or following Nat, who seemed unusually distracted; this was _far_ from her best work. _Well, sure. She’s tired. You don’t have her back anymore._

The press was clean now, and Clint contemplated another round of coffee. Why the hell not? He was already shaking; might as well double down.

There was a part of Clint that was wild with panic, huddling in the back of his brain and whimpering about Phil. He couldn’t afford to indulge it. 

The rational side of him was listening to Nat's litany of possible types of toxins, from "perfectly normal industrial by-products" (of which Tony probably vented many, it was true, but the lab's HVAC systems were entirely separate from the living floors) to "aphrodisiac intoxicants of an unknown nature”-- Clint’s brain skidded to a halt entirely.

“Wait, what?” he asked, and could practically hear her frown at being interrupted. “You what?”

“Possible intoxicants with a stimulating effect on--” 

_Sex pollen?_ She was actually trying to use the old sex pollen gag on him? Clint hit his forehead against the cabinet, rattling the dishes on the inside-- then did it once more for good measure.

_Oh, Nat. It’s been years since you were this obvious._

Well, at least he knew what had piqued her curiosity about Frank Barney-- and it made him wonder just what Phil had told them about his cousin. Or his love life.

“Yeah, I got that. You mean like… E, or some shit like that? Like… airborne Ecstasy?” How _would_ Frank Barney handle this one, anyway? Did he really _have_ to go through the whole "incredulous and scandalized" routine that civilians did?

 _With way more coffee_ , Clint thought, and went to fill the kettle, his phone still tucked between ear and shoulder.

“In essence, although usually with a much more direct effect,” Natasha was saying over the line, and Clint huffed a laugh.

“I don’t believe you.” 

“You don’t have to believe me, Mr. Barney, but it is on the list of possibles. However, I do want to assure you that all this is speculative. The quarantine is merely precautionary.” Her voice was reasonable, smooth-- like Doc Halliday would talk to a particularly skittish parrot or something. Except, of course, that Nat was still trying to provoke him into giving himself away. 

It was not at all like the Nat he wanted to hear now, snarking him back into sanity.

Clint sighed, and slumped with his head against the cabinet, staring down at the kettle. He'd never been on the other side before. Never been the spou-- er, significant oth-- er, person without clearance.

A rattling of the latch on the door made him look down. Lucky was there, lipping his mouth over the knob. As Clint watched, he pulled the screen door open about a chickens-width and Tasha the hen stepped in. 

_Well that's spooky_ he thought, and gave a kind of sodden little laugh.

"Mr. Barney?" Natasha asked over the phone. "Are you all right?"

"No," Clint said, watching Tasha begin to poke around under the counter, gathering up his toast crumbs from the morning-- a decent sign he needed to bother to sweep tomorrow. _No, I’m resisting the urge to hug your namesake chicken because I miss you so much right now._

"No of course I'm not,” he said instead. “Phil's on some kinda super-secret lockdown and you can't even tell me why or how he got hurt. In Avengers Tower. In his own room. I mean, I worry when the news says there's a mission on, that he'll do something brave and stupid and get himself killed... but gassed in his own room? Nat, the irony is killin' me. Can't you just...." 

For a moment, just one, Clint closed his eyes and pretended Natasha really was next to him. He was just opening his mouth again when an exploratory peck at his shoe stopped him. Tasha was at his feet, and she looked up as if she expected him to shed more crumbs for her.

_Goddamnit, what did I almost say?_

Even operating at about half capacity, Nat was still capable of getting under your skin before you knew she’d even come out of her corner-- she was always dangerous. And it had been too long since he'd had to worry about her himself.

"I'll have Agent Coulson's doctors keep you informed," Nat said, over the phone, and her voice had gone a little more human. "Until he can call you himself."

"I'd surely appreciate that," Clint said, and sat down on the floor, waving Lucky into his lap.

"Just..." now Nat's voice took on a speculative quality that made Clint's blood freeze. _God, did I give it all away? Nat, be smart and stay the fuck put._ "One last thing, if you don't mind me asking, Mr. Barney."

"Frank, please, and go ahead," he said around the lump of anxiety stuck in his craw.

"Just who is Cousin Emily, and what's wrong with her?"

Clint burst out laughing before he could stop himself.

"Cousin Emily," he said with some relish, "is a very fine Leghorn with an unfortunate case of mud butt."

He did feel a little revenged for the "sex pollen" canard.

\----

It was strange how light she felt after talking to Frank Barney, how his laughter, even tinged as it was with hysteria, had made her blush like a small child. 

_No wonder he makes Coulson laugh_ , Natasha thought, and then heaved a long sigh.

Yes, they were definitely _kissing_ cousins, and from the way that Frank had reacted-- or _not_ reacted-- to the mention of sex pollen, he was a fit match for Coulson. Smart and subtle.

And genuinely worried. Why hadn't he followed Coulson to New York, then? Why keep him back on North Bar, to learn how to clean chicken bottoms and fix... whatever it was the Keeper of North Bar fixed? 

If the secret of North Bar wasn't there, where was it?

She stopped, on the way back, at what had to be one of the last pay phones in Manhattan. Shut herself in the little booth, and watched the people pass as she waited for the other line to pick up. The reticulated metal cord bit heavily against her hand as she played with it. A steady current of people flowed by outside, and none eddied or halted in that particular way that meant they were watching her.

"Yeah?" said the man on the other end of the line.

"It's me," Natasha greeted him, and straightened. "I need you to do me another favor. Can you take a trip?" 

 

**Two**

 

“Well look on the bright side, at least it wasn’t sex pollen.”

Phil turned his best glare at Director Nicholas Jackass Fury of SHIELD, hoping his lingering pallor made up for whatever dignity he lost by wearing hospital scrubs.

“That isn’t a real thing,” he said. Fury shrugged. It looked very odd in the hazmat suit.

“It could be. Never know.”

“It’s _not_.”

If he’d only been at _home_ now, like he ought to be, Phil’d have been able to turn to Clint to back him up-- or, the thought was nearly terrifying-- explain further. As it was, Phil gave it up as a bad deal.

“How much longer am I in for?” he asked Fury instead, and Fury tilted his hand back and forth in the universal gesture for "this is all approximate, so take it as bullshit until proven otherwise." (Okay, that might be reading in to it a bit.) 

“A couple days at most," Fury said. "Last time we dealt with this, the agents involved stopped bleeping their geiger counters about now. Give it 48 hours to be sure.” 

\----

That was about what Tony Stark had said when he’d wandered in a few days back, in full Iron Man armor, and very seriously told Phil that he’d taken care of the problem and it would _never_ happen again. 

The “problem” had turned out to be a small capsule, tucked into the very edge of the heating ductwork inside Phil’s quarters. Or so Stark had deduced. All he’d found was a gelatinous residue that, when analyzed, turned out to be the remains of a cellulose gum that would rapidly melt when heated. So when the heat turned on late in the evening, on a day finally turning cold enough for even the highly energy-efficient Avengers Tower to need extra heating, the capsule released its contents.

It was devastatingly simple and low-tech. Stark seemed almost more insulted by the vegetable-based delivery method than the act itself. (Phil assumed-- hoped, at any rate-- that was because Stark’d had time to reassure himself Phil had survived.)

What was _not_ low-tech was the powder it had released. It had vaporized rapidly in the heat, sending billowing waves of lightly radioactive gas into Phil’s apartment. SHIELD had provided the answer there.

“It’s something we’ve seen before,” Fury’d said, arms crossed against the glare Rogers was giving him from the next hazmat suit over. Stark had turned to growl at him. Fury shrugged up at him. “An 0-8-4.” 

“A what now?” Phil’d snapped. He was still pale and blue that day, and he wasn’t sure he was entirely imagining the small hum emanating from his skin.

“A device of unknown origin,” Rogers said, biting it out. Even through the hazmat suit that stretched tight across his shoulders, Phil could tell he was vibrating with tension. He doubted it was all on his own behalf. 

“Alien tech,” Stark added, nonchalantly.

“Mostly,” Fury replied. “Though for a little while that’s how you were classified, Stark, and Banner too. Not to mention Thor and his hammer. So maybe some humility here. We’ve seen this one before, Phil. The bad news is it’s radioactive, and it _does_ share chemical properties with some substances found on asteroids. Not… substances anyone in government will admit were found in asteroids, however.”

“Just scraped up from a crater then, huh?” Stark’d asked him, managing to tilt a skeptical head even in his suit. “Except that it vaporizes practically at room temperature, so how does that work?”

“Didn't say we got 'em from asteroid strikes. They were encased in larger capsules, like shells.” Fury sighed, and played with the gloves on his hazmat suit for a moment. His face was wry behind the plastic facemask. “We found a whole box of ‘em in a cave in Quito, way back in ‘99. How they got there, well your guess is as good as mine. Best we figure, they work like flares. Just enough radiation to emit a low-level signal. Some nice blue fog for… aesthetics, maybe.”

“Interstellar _fireworks_?” Phil asked. “I just got attacked by a cosmic fourth of July display?"

Rogers snorted. 

“Just the firecracker version, Phil, and whoever put the cellulose capsule around it was….” Fury looked dark for a moment. “I wish I could tell you it wasn’t one of us, but there were HYDRA personnel in the warehouse storing the devices. I can’t guarantee anything.”

“So… am I sending up a distress beacon? Are aliens going to come pick me up? And… more importantly….”

“Not carcinogenic,” Fury assured him. “We… think. We’re pretty sure.”

“ _Pretty_ sure?” That had been Rogers and Stark in tandem, before Phil could get a word in edgewise. Phil’d concentrated on looking mad and sweating.

“The original agents exposed are still alive and well. Well... “ Fury amended. “None of them have died from cancer. The dose is low. You’re probably in more danger from eating beef jerky.”

“So why’m I stuck in here? Admittedly spacious and welcoming as it is?” Phil waved his hands around at the washed white walls.

“Because you’re safer here,” Rogers said, much to the surprise of both Phil and Fury-- and possibly Rogers himself. 

“For now,” Stark amended quickly. “Just for now. Until I have the problem completely fixed. It… there was…” he sighed, and sat his huge armored self in the little plastic visitors chair. It bowed under his weight.

“I found out how the capsule was placed,” he said quietly. “Took forever. JARVIS doesn’t have eyes everywhere. Yet. I’m working on it, but…” he shrugged. “We reconstructed it from places where he _does_ have video feeds, in the public ventilation system. And frankly, I’m impressed. We have about three seconds of footage from about five days before the attack, of a miniature robot-- no bigger’n an SD card, really, scuttling through one of the ducts. Carrying something that looks like it could be the capsule.”

“Five days before the attack?” Phil asked, and leaned forward. “The party.” 

_Quinn._

“The party,” Stark sighed, and if it was possible for a red and gold mechanical ode to the male engineer superhero ego to look despondent, he did. “Of course, the ductwork in the party rooms doesn’t lead directly to the ductwork in _yours_ but….”

“But enough people were coming and going from the other floors that anyone could have been on the appropriate levels,” Phil finished for him. But his brain was still quivering, and he fought to keep his face smooth. _Quinn, Quinn, Quinn, Quinn, QUINN._

“Right,” Stark said, then looked up. “Though not really _anyone._ Either someone with connections to SHIELD-- or HYDRA, assuming that ol’Nick over here is right, and HYDRA agents wandered off with some of the capsules.”

“We had a _small_ security risk at the time, as it turned out,” Nick drawled, and Phil remembered the look on his face. He'd seen it once in Kosovo, where Phil’d surprised Marcus Johnson sitting by himself on a bench outside an old stone church. It was not long after Orlat. Phil’s first instinct at the time had been to make sure no one (else) had died since he’d last checked in.

“Well,” Phil said, and picked at the band-aid still covering the bruises on his hands where some nurses clearly picked for their skill in biocontainment rather than vein-finding had inserted IVs, “that’s a relief.”

“What?” Fury asked, at the same time as Stark’s head snapped up. Rogers, on the other hand, nodded as if he maybe understood.

Phil felt a smile begin to creep in at the corners, for the first time since he’d hung up on Clint that morning. (Natasha had brought his cell phone to him as soon as he regained consciousness. From what little Clint had been able to tell him over the phone, the guilty look on her face was entirely earned.)

“Up until now,” Phil said, “I’d assumed that either Stark had me gassed so I’d leave, or you had, Nick, so I _couldn’t_ leave.”

He’d palmed the cell phone before he said it, and it was a testament to just how far gone both the Director of SHIELD and the head of Stark Industries were, that he was able to take a picture of them, staring at him in shock through huge rosy suits, before they could react.

Captain America burst into laughter.

It was perhaps not his most mature moment ever, but in his defense, he’d been in quarantine for three days at the time, and he was about to miss going home for the second weekend in a row.

And Clint had brought condoms.

He deserved whatever petty revenge he could get. Clint was going to _love_ the picture.

\----

The rustle of Fury’s now-familiar hazmat suit brought Phil back to the present, and he raised what he hoped was an appropriately quizzical eyebrow.

“Still waiting for an answer, Cheese,” Fury said, “Or were you drifting?”

“Drifting,” Phil admitted, then answered Fury’s snort with, “not much else to do in here.”

“What, nothing good on TV?” Fury asked, looking up at it. Phil’d had it on for about three hours before giving up; no matter what channel he turned to or what he looked up on Netflix, he got bored after five minutes. He’d done better with ebooks, read on a tablet that was no doubt going to be dumped in a hazardous waste disposal as soon as he was out, but what he’d really _wanted_ was one of the books Clint had sent him-- something tactile, that smelled like North Bar still, held the memory of all the times he’d been on those pages before.

Something grounding.

Apart from instructing Clint in the finer arts of cutting back the marsh grass and winterizing Lola, Phil’d had nothing to connect him to the outside world except his visitors. Instead of answering Fury directly, he sat forward and wrapped his arms around his knees.

“You asked me to do a job, Marcus, and it’s one I can’t really do from here. No one will tell me how Hand’s doing.”

“That’s because I reassigned her,” Fury told him, then held up a palm to forestall Phil’s protest. “Not entirely, don’t worry. She’ll be back next weekend. But I only have so many Level 8s in this damn organization, and I needed her. Got a couple agents rotating through. They've been in the field for a while, so they should be moderately safe. Meanwhile….”

“Meanwhile, you’re letting the Avengers get a taste of what life without SHIELD would be like,” Phil finished for him, since Fury was only the most frequent orange-suited visitor to his little biocontainment unit. “That doesn’t sound like it’s been going well for them.”

At various times each of the Avengers had appeared. Natasha came most frequently, followed by Sam. It had been Thor, however, who’d sat with him after their call-out two days ago and described their battle with the man calling himself Graviton. The fight had ended badly; Sam had broken a leg after he’d been pulled from the sky by a sudden increase in his own specific gravity. Stark had suffered a similar fate. His suit had saved him from broken limbs but needed to be substantially rebuilt. Thor’d finally managed to disintegrate Graviton with a lightning bolt, while he was distracted trying to hold the Hulk back. 

Exploding supervillians seemed to be the theme of the month, Phil had thought somewhat uncharitably. 

“Huh, well, no,” Fury said, but he didn’t look as smug as Phil had expected. “Last fight took a toll on ‘em, you’re right, and yeah-- they wouldn’t have been distracted trying to evacuate civilians too if they'd had us. You’d have known to feed info to Cap and Stark at the same time, since Cap didn’t have the right view. But no, the ingrates are convinced we wouldn’t have Graviton at all without SHIELD.” He got up to pace-- or, really, shamble since the hazmat suit didn’t allow for dramatic flare.

“Oh, so?” 

“We finally IDed him.” Sour lemons probably would’ve given Fury a more pleasant look on his face. “Turns out, ‘Graviton’ used to be Dr. Franklin Hall. One of ours.”

“Ah. Well that’s problematic.” 

_Highly problematic_. Phil bit back the thousand questions that occurred to him, and tried to focus on the fact that at least Fury was giving him something that was beginning to sound like an official briefing. _I’ll be back in the game soon._ If he couldn’t go home to North Bar and his life, at least he could be out _doing_ something. 

Anyway, the Avengers might be able to take care of themselves-- mostly-- but they deserved better than that. If this was going to make his job harder?

Phil was going to have some words with someone.

“To be fair,” Fury sighed, and went over to play with the detritus on Phil’s bedside table, “he’s not one of the ones we lost with HYDRA. He went missing a few months before that; kidnapped, we heard. I had _good_ agents on that one-- the best. You’d have approved. We never found Hall. Then, well, we got a bit distracted.” 

He picked up and put down Phil’s phone, after examining the lock screen (Tony the hen, taken at sunset-- Clint had sent the picture a few days before with the note “preens almost as much as the real one; still broody. Think she misses you.”) and moved on to the styrofoam cup with the bendy straw. Phil remembered Marcus Johnson playing with a nearly identical cup in a military hospital in Germany. They’d been visiting Holly, who’d nearly gotten himself blown up in Kosovo. It had been easier for Phil to watch Marcus’s fingers bend the straw back and forth, than to concentrate on his battered lover.

“That’s not on you,” he said to Fury, to cover the sudden chill that the memory brought. “That can’t be on you.” 

“Can be, apparently,” Fury said, and looked up. “Because-- and keep in mind there is _nothing_ to suggest a current connection-- back before he came to SHIELD, Hall used to work with Ian Quinn.”

It took Phil a long time to assimilate that. 

“That man… turns up in a distressing number of places,” he said at last. Fury snorted his agreement. “Is this supposed to be confirmation that Hawkeye was right about Quinn?”

“I have no idea, Cheese. None.” 

Fury looked it, too; worn and legitimately confused, _baffled_ , in fact, a look that sat oddly on his face, like he hadn’t practiced it in years. He probably hadn’t-- it struck Phil as a little horrible that Fury had to be in quarantine to be able to let that face out. That using it in the outside world was too dangerous.

“Well. Rogers and Stark are asking for more investigation?”

“Yes,” Fury replied, gathering himself together. “And I’ll give it to them. But Quinn was a dead end before, when Barton went after him; I can’t see anything’s changed. Meanwhile,” he eased himself into a seat closer to Phil, and folded himself into it, slumping down, “it’s bringing all the old shit up. Turn on the TV, Cheese. It’s game seven tonight.” 

Phil did as he was told, since there wasn’t much else he could offer to his old friend. Midway through the first inning, turning to Marcus to find out what he thought about the play at the plate, Phil realized that the Director of SHIELD had fallen asleep. His face was hidden from the door by the side of the hazmat suit’s hood.

 _I need to get out of here and back to work before we all fall apart,_ he thought.

 

**Three**

 

"No, higher," Kate said, and guided America's hand gently upwards, curling their fingers together for half a moment. America held her breath, watching their hands move in unison. Kate pressed so closely against her back that she ended up holding her breath, too, involuntarily. She went on holding it as America’s eyes narrowed with intent. Never in her life had she felt more like she was fused to another person, like the boundaries between her body and America’s had broken, blurring one into the other.

(Well, except perhaps for the way her nipples seemed _entirely_ too far from America’s skin, and were trying to burrow through the layers of fabric separating them. She’d never known they could _do_ that.)

America shifted slightly, and Kate felt the tension as it flowed through their bodies like a tide, flexing and relaxing the muscles under Kate’s other hand where it laid gently against America’s ribs, just above the curve of her waist. 

“Like this?” America asked finally, gasped it out like a plea. 

“Yes. Yes, just there. That’s perfect.”

Then she shivered, as America’s hair brushed against her neck while she shook her head.

“Is not, chica, don’t flatter me,” she said, but fondness turned her voice to honey. Her chuckle shook both their bodies, dissolving the last of Kate’s self-control. She was just turning her head to bite down on the hollow of America’s neck, so Kate could hold her in place with her teeth while letting her hands roam until they found bare flesh, when America stiffened in her arms.

“You’re getting better at that,” Hawkeye said from behind her.

“Damnit, make some noise!” Kate snapped, backing up three steps even as she did. America, for her part, put down the bow so she could better glare at him. 

It was hard to keep one’s dander up, though, in the face of Clint’s amusement. He was coming around the side of the house, hands shoved deep in his pockets, his stride rolling along, open anorak flapping against his forearms, looking like he’d been born to be Keeper. Hell, with the tawny beard and the shag of hair blowing in the wind, he could even have come from over in the Viking Village. _He’s gone native,_ she thought, and then: _No. But he_ is _turning into Coulson._

Skye trailed carefully in his footsteps, eyes on the ground, rolling her feet like he did. Lucky bounded down past them, to come sit at Kate’s feet and grin, winking happily at her and letting his tongue loll out.

“Heya, Luck,” she said, and bent down to scratch behind his ears, so that no one could see the blush that was rapidly spreading across her cheeks and down her neck, down her… _I did not need to realize I was a full-bust blusher at this moment._ “So, you look happy.”

Clint shrugged.

“It’s a good day,” he said, and pulled in a lungful of air. “Finally got the hang of things over at the power plant I think. We’re back to full power; mansion should be all lit up again.” He looked around him with satisfaction, like he’d just made a particularly difficult shot look easy. Kate wondered if he looked like that during battle, as well.

“How much of that was Skye?” America asked, and brushed past Kate, one hand tangling briefly in her hair and sending a jolt straight down her spine and into her jeans.

_I think I’ll just stay down here for the next eon or so,_ Kate thought.

“Not as much as you’d think,” Skye said, coming up and plopping down on the drying lawn as America handed Kate’s bow off to Clint. “He’s actually picking this shit up pretty well.” 

Clint snorted, and looked the bow over.

“Oh ye of little faith. I got this. Well,” he amended, and looked them over, with the same satisfied look he’d just given the island in general. “ _We_ got this. North Bar’s never had it so good.”

“Yeah, you’ll get good at it just in time to go back and Avenge things again,” Kate pointed out, and moved over to sprawl on the grass near Skye. The angle gave her a breathtaking view of America’s backside, so it took her a moment to realize Clint hadn’t responded. “Right?” she prompted him.

“Right,” Clint said, and looked around him again, drinking in the scenery almost desperately. His hands tightened on the bow, and he reached out to her for an arrow with insistent hands. She handed one up to him, trying not to feel too much like a Waterhouse nymph. America snorted, and tossed him the rest of the quiver.

They let him shoot for a while as they got settled on the grass. Kate pulled America down next to her on the grass. When Skye looked over at them, her eyes twinkling from under her bangs, Kate pretended she’d just wanted to be able to show America the salient points of Clint’s form. Clint and Skye mercifully let that one pass.

America watched for a couple shots, probably just to be generous, before shifting back into Kate’s arms to press her nose against the shell of Kate’s ear. Her breath sent goosebumps up Kate’s neck, as she whispered:

“I know which Hawkeye I like better.” 

(Then she nipped at Kate’s earlobe-- which must, from the reaction it created, have had some kind of acupressure point linked directly to Kate’s chest.)

Behind them, Skye cleared her throat. Loudly. Repeatedly. As if she’d somehow gotten an entire bunny’s worth of dust stuck in her throat. 

“Were we gonna debrief or what, boss?” she asked.

Kate sighed, and dragged her earlobe away from America’s sharp teeth, straightening up. America snorted, ticklish against her neck, and pulled away a little. She kept one knee pressed to the small of Kate’s back; ever since their night under the Trashcan’s shadow she’d been reluctant to entirely separate from Kate. _Maybe she thinks I’ll run as soon as I get out of grabbing distance?_

“Yeah, let’s get started,” Clint said, though he didn’t turn around and didn’t put down the bow. “Any news on Quinn’s yacht?”

“Nothing yet,” Skye said. “I’ve been checking on its registration, and it doesn’t go _anywhere_ interesting. Mostly between North Bar and Atlantic City, sometimes hangs out in the Bay a bit. I’m thinking I need to go down to Atlantic City and check the berth. They could be faking the transponder codes, after all. Everything’s still okay on the LBI front. Well, except for Kate.”

Kate groaned, and put her head in her hands. Clint looked over at her, a question riding his eyebrows. 

“It’s nothing,” she said, and wished she could believe it. “Nothing at all. Just… Wanda Jackson came up to me and Skye yesterday, at the Blue Peter.”

“And?” Clint said, when she hesitated. Skye and America were both looking at her, nearly identical expressions of sympathy on her face. Clint looked nervous, and Kate supposed she could understand that, given that the first time she’d met Wanda Jackson she’d sorta been trying to drive the woman to punch her. Thank god she hadn’t. Wanda, as Doc Halliday had explained afterwards, was _the_ hub of gossip on Long Beach Island. They needed her in their pocket.

“She kinda… recruited me for this Preservation thing she chairs? Because Doc Halliday told her I knew Robert’s Rules of Order? Which--” she hastened to point out, “is only because Dad forced me to be in, like, mock Senate when I was a kid. I think it was his idea of punishment.” 

It had been-- thought what for she still had no idea. This felt like punishment, too-- probably just what she deserved, after all the luck she’d been using up lately, what with _meeting Hawkeye_ and _kissing America_. 

“So, what, you’re taking over for Phil?”

“Kinda, yeah?” She didn’t want to look up; Clint was laughing at her, she was certain he was.

“Hey, from what the Doc told me, between the Preservation Society and the Fire Brigade, we’re gonna have all LBI owing us soon,” Skye said. Kate felt grateful for the defense-- or reminder. The universe had a really bad sense of humor, if _she_ was gonna be the one to keep Wanda Jackson on their sweet side.

“Sure,” America replied, and she stood and stretched, leaving Kate feeling abandoned on the grass. “Now we just gotta get you into something.” 

“And you,” Skye told her, rising also. Kate followed them, if only for something to do.

“Nah,” America shrugged. “I’m not really a joiner.”

That she could say it with a straight face, around the three of them, around _Kate_ , was about the ballsiest thing Kate’d seen in a long time. She resisted the urge to do something horrible like rumple America’s hair. It would only lead to wrestling.

“We’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” Clint said, and looked back down at the bow. 

“You heard from the other boss?” Skye asked him. He shrugged and shot off another arrow, sending it straight at the center of the cluster he’d created.

“He should be out Wednesday evening. Maybe be here this weekend.” 

“Good,” Skye said, “Maybe he’ll have more from SHIELD-- or the party. That is, assuming he doesn’t get blown up or called out or something else Avenger-y again. His luck’s been shit. Hope he doesn’t get halfway here and run into a deer.”

“Yeah,” Clint drew, sighting down at the target with a mixture of exasperation and concentration. “That would suck all right.” He released the arrow, and a split moment later it found its target, splitting Kate’s own arrow right down the center. She might have growled.

_One of these days, I’m gonna do that to him._

“Hey, anybody there?” a voice called.

It was a rich voice, an amused one-- and _definitely_ not one they knew. 

Clint, Kate, America, and Skye all looked at each other, frozen in their assorted positions. The voice had come from just beyond the house, from the path that led away downhill towards the cottage.

Finally, America elbowed Skye.

 _Good call_ Kate thought, as her brain chugged to life again.

Skye gulped, and yelled out a: “Yeah?” that sounded a hell of a lot less shaky than she looked. 

Kate found herself with an armful of bow, all of a sudden, and the sense that she was one of those bystanders in an old cartoon-- Clint had flashed past her like he was the Roadrunner or something. Her hands moved on reflex, clutching the bow her chest as it tried to slither out of her grip. 

“He’s gone for the bushes,” America whispered at her, and took her hand. Kate looked down, to find America moving one arm away from its deathgrip on the bow. She locked eyes with Kate, and Kate lost time, trying to read everything America was boring into her. It was mostly, she thought _be cool, chica,_ and that wasn’t fair because Kate? Kate was _always_ cool.

America slipped the quiver strap up onto Kate’s shoulder without breaking her gaze, then bopped her on the nose.

 _Oh. Right. Intruder,_ Kate thought, and focused.

Skye shoved forward, straightening her shoulders and trying to bring some authority to her alterna-student appearance. Kate thought she caught Skye imitating Clint’s rolling stride, and Phil’s wry smile, as she advanced to meet their visitor.

(There might have been something chicken-y about her eyes, too, or maybe that was just Kate being uncharitable again.)

He appeared, finally, coming down along the path with an unhurried lope, all dark suit and jewel-toned shirt and fancy smile behind a well-trimmed goatee.

“Holy _shit_ ” Skye breathed out. 

Kate was inclined to agree.

He wasn’t just built, he was drop-dead gorgeous, movie-star good looking, but he didn’t seem to give a damn about it. He wore that black suit like it was a silk slip, his body moved with a distinct groove, and his bare scalp gleamed in the thick autumn sunlight. _Tall, dark, and handsome just got redefined,_ Kate thought. 

America shifted beside her, as if she knew exactly what Kate was thinking.

Well. A girl couldn’t help but _look_ , after all. And gorgeous as he was, the danger he represented to them wasn’t that he was gonna steal Kate away, after all.

No, more than likely, Mr. Tall, Dark, and Droolworthy was looking for Clint. For Hawkeye. Who’d disappeared and left the three of them here to fend the guy off.

_Does this make us the sidekicks? Aw, damn. I don’t wanna be a sidekick._

The man looked between the three of them, geniality written all over his face, and for a brief moment Kate thought they’d all gotten it wrong. He was too damn _nice_ to be a threat. Then he spoke.

“Hi,” he said, grinning impartially at them all, “Can any of you tell me where to find Frank Barney? My name’s Agent Triplett. I’m here from SHIELD.”

 

**Four**

 

Even the frosted glass and aggressively shiny steel beams that Phil passed seemed to be gleaming at him in welcome, to the extent that he expected to see a choreographed mob of mixed-level SHIELD agents, assets, and scientists come skipping down the corridor singing songs about wildflowers and first loves and freedom. Possibly just before meeting a strike team slinking in from the opposite direction, stopping short, and then joining hands and falling into a collective love at first sight. 

He could practically hear the strings swelling in the background.

In reality, his return to the free, unsterile, world was heralded by nothing more than the usual mix of clerks with files clutched to their chests, a couple of dragging field agents-- battered and limping and probably fresh from an op-- and two scientists, kids, practically, with their heads together, finishing each others’ sentences at a mile a minute while gaping at their surroundings.

What else Phil had expected at three am, he couldn’t be sure. 

His first indication that he might be released early had come at about ten, when he’d turned around to a knock on the door, and seen a tall young Agent wave at him through the window, and hold up something that looked remarkably like his spare suit-- the one that should still be in the cedar closet back on North Bar.

Phil had wandered to the window and opened the intercom, and the man had introduced himself as Agent Triplett. 

“Brought you a suit,” he said, and Phil nodded and kept his face blank, “and a couple other things the Director said to grab.” He indicated a bag on the table behind him. “I guess a lot of your stuff at the Tower had to be incinerated.”

Phil winced, and Agent Triplett wrinkled his nose in sympathetic disgust. He just stood there a moment longer, grinning, and finally Phil said:

“Did Frank help you out?” because it was a natural enough question-- wasn’t it? It was getting so hard to tell, anymore.

“Nah,” Triplett said, shrugging, “he was off in town. Some girl named Skye? She said she was helping him out.”

“Yes,” Phil felt himself relax minutely, even as he realized disappointment was washing over him. _You idiot, even if Clint had stayed to talk, and not be recognized, what was he going to do? Give Agent Triplett a kiss to give to you?_ “yes, I’m glad. Skye’s… a real find. And he’ll need the help.”

“Yeah, I could tell,” Triplett said.

“Why? Was it… is everything all right there?” Phil pressed forward, stopped himself, then shook his head. 

“No, yeah, sure-- I mean, near as I could tell. I didn’t get the _full_ tour, but they took me around the mansion and the cottage and all. Introduced me to the chickens.” He twinkled up at Phil, and Phil didn’t trust his smile at all. It was too toothy, too like a cat-- or, okay, an eager labrador, maybe.

“Who’s ‘they’?” 

“Oh, man! Did he not tell you? Barney’s got himself a fan club. I know I’m jealous-- this girl Skye, and two more. Kate and… America? America. Just hanging out shooting arrows. Did you know?”

“I… I knew Kate came to practice sometimes, yes.” Well, that was all right, then. Mostly. 

“She practices much more, she’ll be competing for a spot on the Avengers,” Triplett said, and shook his head. “She’s incredible. Hell, she’d split one arrow in half with another. So, anyway, looks like Barney and the island are in good hands. And you got your suit, for when you get sprung.”

“Thank you, Agent Triplett,” Phil said, and Trip shook his head.

“Just ‘Trip,’ man, and it’s no problem. I’ll see you when you get back to the Tower.”

“Oh. Are you-- Fury said he was rotating agents through?”

“Yeah, I’m on tonight. My first night.” Triplett bounced a little on his heels, looking like a ten-year old trying to pretend he’s too old for Christmas morning while, while desperate to get a look under the tree. 

“Good luck to you,” Phil told him. “And hopefully mostly quiet times. Will you be there most nights?”

“Nah… don’t think so? I’m usually out on ops-- got dragged into this just because Hand was gonna kill everyone else. She and I get along okay. Look-- I’ll let you go now, right? It took forever to get back from Jersey.”

The second indication Phil had that he was going to leave soon had been a doctor walking into his room sans hazmat and shaking his hand.

Very seldom in Phil’s life had he had to try so hard to resist the temptation to go down on his knees and kiss somebody’s feet.

Phil was dressed and out the door before it even occurred to him that he didn’t have a lot of options for getting back to the Tower, he was starving, and no-one was expecting him for a full day. There was no _way_ he was going back into quarantine, however.

He shuffled himself into an elevator and leaned against the wall, still happily breathing in the air of freedom. The doors were just shutting when a senior agent, long of stride and dour of look, glided down the corridor, just visible through the closing gap.

Phil jammed his thumb on the door open button, then began frantically shoving out of the elevator, his entire body gone cold and goosebumps sweeping up his arms and across his neck.

The agent was still in the corridor when the doors finally grumbled their way open, and Phil nearly tumbled out. The man's back was broad and straight, despite the time of day, and his fine gray suit swished just enough to show a hint of the behind beneath. 

It was a behind Phil was _certain_ he knew.

He pressed a hand to his sternum, intent on forcing his heart back into his chest, and started down the corridor behind the man. His shoulder brushed the wall, his feet rolled heel to toe, knees bent just a hair-- his entire body had defaulted to stealth mode without giving his mind a vote, it seemed.

The man slipped around the corner, headed for the medical wing Phil had just left. Despite the tension in his calves urging Phil to turn and run, he followed, stopping at the stainless pillar that marked the corner and peering around it. 

Halfway down the hall, underneath the pale glow of a buzzing fluorescent, the senior agent had stopped. He was talking with another senior agent, a short young blonde woman sporting butterfly bandages along one cheek. Just at the moment, the short blonde woman could have been a short blonde panda, for all Phil cared.

It was the ghost she was talking to that had Phil transfixed.

He was the same, he was the very same, even if his stupid damned widow’s peak had receded and gone iron gray over the years, his eyes had acquired creases at the corners, and his body had perhaps thickened a little in places and slimmed about the shoulders. He still stood with that insouciant little lean, still tilted his head just so when he talked, still grinned like a damned shark, lethal and magnetic. And he still had that eagle’s beak of a nose, the one Phil had once sworn he’d dream about for the rest of his life.

Phil watched, rooted in place, certain the hallucination was going to blow away in a moment, until the agent began to turn back towards him, eyes still on the woman at his side, and yes, oh yes.  
There was no room for doubt left.

Holly was back.

\----

Phil ducked into the elevator before they passed, stabbing frantically at the button. Holly. _Holly_. Jesus. Fucking. 

Holly.

Dead-fifteen-years-in-some-anonymous-mass-grave-in-the-Balkans Holly.

Phil calculated the possibilities while the elevator descended, scrubbing both hands over his face, trying to erase the image he’d just seen. His reflection was pale and distorted in the brushed metal siding, as if Phil were the ghost. 

Possibility A: Phil was actually hallucinating. 

This, given that he’d just gotten out of biocontainment, was not impossible. Still, he’d likely have started earlier if he were going to.

Possibility B: Holly’d had an identical twin. 

_But,_ he thought as he stepped out of the elevator and headed for the motor pool in the basement, _I’ve met his next of kin, and it wasn’t a goddamned twin. And Holly didn’t have any reason to lie about that. That… that I knew of, anyway._

Possibility C: Shapeshifters or masks. 

Well, it _was_ SHIELD, after all. And aliens had invaded New York only a few years back, and Phil’d just spent most of a week in quarantine because of a close encounter with a cosmic cherry bomb. So, yes, it was possible. But why Holly’s face? Why now? Unless it was another attack on Phil, some bizarre attempt to make him crack now. Or an attack on Fury… Marcus Johnson had worked with Holly after all. 

Phil pinned this possibility to his mental table. That left, in the broad category of things:

Possibility D: Holly was alive. And a SHIELD agent.

Holly was alive.

And a SHIELD agent. 

On reflection, it seemed even less likely than shapeshifters, alien or otherwise. Phil’s stomach fell, then swooped weirdly again. (That might have been the elevator coming to a stop. He could tell himself that, anyway, explain away the queasy feeling in his gut.)

He’d gone to North Bar to leave Holly’s ghost behind. After fifteen years of learning to let him go, to have the man literally walk past him nearly as soon as he left the island seemed… excessively ironic. Practically gothic. 

Phil wanted so badly to be back on North Bar now, where life was sane and people didn’t get gassed with alien firecrackers and give off radiation. Where dead lovers didn’t walk through the corridors of their work at three in the morning. Quiet, sensible North Bar, where Clint was even now--

Clint. Yes, of course. 

Phil pulled out his phone and dialed, cursing the shaking in his hands. 

Clint answered with a muffled “Mnrphil?” and Phil realized that of course he was in bed still. (In bed-- and likely cuddled under Phil’s quilt, Lucky by his side. Maybe the two of them had even been snoring in tandem, the way they’d been the morning Phil’d gotten up early to go to New York.) 

“Yeah, Cl-- calling late. Sorry, Frank.” _Sorry I’ve woken you up to share in my nightmare._ “Um. Can you go to the storage room and check something for me?”

“R’now? S’wrong?” Clint’s voice was beginning to unslur, and a boxspring creaked in the background. Had he turned on the light?

Probably not-- Phil hadn’t heard him curse yet.

“I… yes… please, I know it’s early but….”

“No, s’alright. You alright? Out of quarantine?” Footsteps began to pad; Clint up and searching for something.

“Yeah, I am. Do me… do me favor. There’s a stack of boxes in the corner of the porch closest to the door; I moved them from the guest room. Find… find the one with an oil stain on it. I don’t remember the label. There’s a picture in there. There’s… it’s me and… just, go, find it. And… and let me know when you do.”

“Sure,” Clint smacked his lips, and Phil bit his own against the panic welling up in him. He hesitated just outside the little office where the motor pool staff member was sitting, mostly asleep, looking jaundiced under the buzzing lights. “Will do.” He hung up. 

The drive back to Avengers Tower was mostly uneventful, except for the way Phil white-knuckled the steering wheel as he navigated the night streets, still slick from an earlier rain. The lights blurred as he passed and the slow shuffle of the graveyard shift through the city’s arteries started to settle him.

When he got out of the car, a text from Frank B. was waiting for him on his phone. Phil held his breath as he opened it, nearly shaking the phone as the message screen grumbled slowly to life, and the text loaded at a speed that would have been unacceptable even in the ‘90s.

When he finally read it, he blanched, then began moving towards his own car. It was parked near the other end of the private garage, sitting lonely for two weeks now. 

He didn’t even bother to text Clint back-- just began following the direction:

_Get. Home. Now._

\----

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week: My boyfriend’s back… from the dead, grand reunions, and lots of skulking.
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed that cliffie. Tonight's [ tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/100476863846/washed-ashore-chapter-15-becalmed-kathar) is the response I had to my outline, when that little plot point turned up on it.
> 
> More than even the usual thanks to Faeleverte for her super-fast lightning betaing, to bring you this chapter on time.


	16. Coming Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corporal Hollis is Alive and Well and Living in SHIELD. Phil and Clint have other matters on their mind before they can begin to deal with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you prefer to skip the down and dirty, skip chapter two, at least until the break. 
> 
> Obligatory Chicken Note: Please do not attempt to suitcase your chickens.

**One**

The sun was still low in the eastern sky as Phil turned onto the Manahawkin Bay bridge, and it blinded him momentarily. He managed to fumble the visor down and his sunglasses on and the white pain receded, showing him alarmingly close to the guard rail.

If he'd still been in the state in which he'd left Avengers Tower, the unexpected glare would probably have been the end of him. During the drive south, however, watching out of the driver-side window as the sky grayed to blue, then tinted red and pink, he'd started to settle a little. Or, at least, to exchange one set of anxieties for another. Somewhere about the middle of the Pine Barrens, driving through miles upon miles of scraggly conifer, the falling dismay over seeing Holly had been overtaken by the rising nervousness at the thought of reuniting with Clint.

Nothing identifiable was behind the itchy feeling-- Clint's insinuations during their phone calls had left no doubt in Phil's mind that he was going to get a _positive_ reception. He was grateful for it, but no longer stunned. 

There might have been more lingering awe that _Hawkeye_ wanted to take him (back) to bed, more doubt that Clint would still want him after he saw him again, except that he'd just spent two solid weeks herding Avengers. Clint was brave, amazing, and talented beyond belief-- but so were the rest of his team, and Phil'd seen Captain America in sleep pants and survived. 

What remained was the bald realization that he was about to see again, to _hold_ again, the man he... the man who... _his_ man. _His_ Clint. Caught in the bubble of his own thoughts, without the quotidian rounds of North Bar or the aggravations of Avengers Tower to buffer him, he was helpless against the full force of the affection that hit him, stronger with each passing mile.

It was terrifying.

 _Clint_ was terrifying. Phil was sure he'd get to North Bar, find Clint-- whether still in bed and wrapped in Phil's quilt or sitting on the porch with coffee and a chicken and a dog-- and that he wouldn't be able to look at him without hyperventilating.

He wasn't sure which was the scarier reaction to face-- a Clint who wasn't similarly overcome by the sight of Phil, or a Clint who was.

Imagining Clint overcome with anything-- emotion or relief or just plain lust-- made the last stages of the drive fly at supersonic speed. Phil navigated his way back to Gansett Light largely on some kind of homing instinct. The same drive took him straight down to the docks. Lola greeted him there, gleaming cherry-bright and cozy when he pulled the tarp off her.

Being in Lola, crashing through the morning surf and the spray as he motored towards North Bar, shook him awake again, alert to all the familiar markers of a return to the island. The waves slapped her sides with a fast rhythmic thud, the breeze whipped at his tie and insinuated itself under his jacket, and the circling seagulls screamed at him from above.

On his right the spit of North Bar ran towards the sea, marked mostly by the whitecaps where waves broke and fell away and the tufty-grassed tops of the dunes shouldering out of the surf. Bits of rock jetty or lone poles dotted the shore at irregular intervals, reminders that the spit was kept from eroding only through constant vigilance and tedious labor. There were figures on the spit, too: seagulls hopping along the crest and a lone man striding along its length, followed by a gallivanting dog. As Phil watched, man and dog disappeared onto the far side of the spit. 

There was not one moment of doubt in Phil's mind that it was Clint, not even with the ever-present threat of watchers. The imprint of those shoulders was burned into his retinas and the beat of that lope matched his own pulse.

_How did he manage to burrow so far under my skin without me noticing?_

A voice in his head that sounded a little like Holly's grumbled that it was pathetic, for a man of his age to fall so far so fast.

Holly could go _stuff_ himself.

Phil tore his gaze away and concentrated on bringing Lola in to dock.

The last lingering urgency about Holly ebbed as he set foot on North Bar's welcoming shore; everything was Clint. Phil was out on the spit, stepping down to the far side where marsh grass fringed the shore, picking his way along the narrow beach, without even knowing how he'd gotten there-- or when he'd taken off his shoes and socks. A long line of low cylindrical buoys bobbed just offshore, rolling like a toy snake with the swell. He'd walked that way so often it was hardwired into him; North Bar took him there without conscious direction.

Out where the buoys swayed Clint's small dark silhouette was making its way from one to the next, dunking down occasionally beneath one or another, tugging on lines and connections. His shoulders were nearly submerged; at high tide he'd have been swimming. 

_He must be freezing_ Phil thought-- and then noticed Lucky sitting on the shore, watching Clint attentively. He was guarding what looked like a stack of blankets, a thermos, and a battery-powered lantern.

Lucky noticed him, too. Every single muscle in his body jumped at once, precipitating him into the air and bringing him down already running in Phil's direction. Phil might be 90%-- okay, 95%-- preoccupied with Clint at the moment, but the sight of Lucky streaking towards him, tongue lolling, ears at full mast, tail waving like a pennant off his galumphing stern, was enough to break his heart.

Lucky barrelled straight into his legs, knocking him over, and slobbered every last square inch of exposed skin. 

"Missed you too, mutt," Phil told Lucky, ruffling his ears like the fate of the world depended on getting each one thoroughly rubbed. Then he looked back up-- and dropped his hands.

Clint was standing waist-deep in the surf, a wrench in one gloved hand and a bowled-over look on his face. He _did_ have to be freezing-- both the worn gray t-shirt and the threadbare jeans he was wearing were plastered to his body and water streamed off every inch of him. His hair was slicked back and his now-full beard was dripping. That he'd come despite the cold was dedication to his work in the face of the fall water temperatures that kind of blew Phil away.

Phil's heart flopped over and surrendered. Just like he'd known it would.

"Hi," he called to Clint. "I'm back."

Clint nodded.

"Welcome home," he said.

\----

Sleep, after he'd found the photograph Phil wanted, had refused to come. Clint _had_ tried, tossing himself down on the couch and dragging Lucky to him, but without much expectation that it would actually work. Corporal Hollis's face-- his unexpectedly familiar face-- flared behind Clint's eyes. 

Coulson and Hollis, the name tape on their chests read, but Clint hadn't needed that to know what he was seeing. He'd seen photos like it before; they existed for any two soldiers in any war in any quarter of the world who were willing-- had probably attempted-- to lay down their lives for each other. Their grins were predatory; one shark, one snake. If anything, the only hint to their deeper-than-battle-buddies relationship was in the perfection with which they avoided any hint in their postures that there might be something _unmanly_ about the relationship. DADT-era love; how fucking romantic.

Clint's thoughts had devolved from there, very fast, and he was halfway down the rabbit hole before he realized he'd fallen. He wasn't ready yet to face any of the rest of the implications of that picture. There was time and enough for all his confusion and dread when Phil arrived and told him _why_ he'd asked Clint to go searching for it at oh-dark-thirty in the morning. In the meanwhile, if he couldn't sleep, he could keep busy other ways. 

So he'd gone to work, feeding the chickens by lantern light then taking Lucky and a thermos of coffee off down to the power plant to check on the repairs he and Skye'd done. There was one task left on the list, and that was finding out why the portion of the power that was generated from wave buoys deployed along the eastern tip of the island was down more than half from the month previous. They had never produced much power, Phil had explained-- the R&D folks were trying to convert an offshore technology to near-shore use. Still, they ought to have been pumping out more than a light bulb's worth of juice. He could have asked for help from Stark Industries staff. Had he been Frank Barney in real life, he _might_ have asked for help from staff. He was not, and he couldn't afford more people tramping about the island.

It was nearly dawn. The water wasn't going to be _unbearably_ freezing. Probably.

"Early morning swim?" he'd asked Lucky, who'd grumbled up at him that he was a typical crazy-ass human, and this was a terrible idea, and clearly someone had to go with him to keep him from drowning.

Which was why he was currently half-frozen, three-quarters worn out, and entirely soaked as he ran down each sausage-like buoy checking for loose connections like they were grossly overgrown christmas lights, where one went down if all the rest did. _And at least there's feedback to the R &D guys-- if you can get a ten-buck set of lights that stays lit when a bulb goes, they should damn well be able to make a set of buoys where half the string doesn't stop transmitting power when one gets tangled up in seaweed._

Then Lucky took off down the beach, barking his doggish welcome. All thoughts of gnawed cables and wet jeans and retracting balls flew from Clint's mind. It didn't need a clairvoyant to know that Phil was home.

(Home-- what an ambiguous word. Phil had come back to his own home; Phil had come home to the place Clint happened to be living-- anything, surely, but Phil'd come home to _their_ home. That idea was so absurd he couldn't even take it seriously-- best to just brush it off and remind his mind later that it knew better.)

By the time Clint'd started ploughing through the waves, Phil had been half buried under a moveable furry mountain. So Clint walked slowly, wanting to give Lucky time with his master, and took the opportunity to re-memorize Phil. 

He was well worth the memorizing-- all rumpled in his gray suit, tie loosened and collar open, arms holding Lucky close and ruffling him with savage affection. He looked like he belonged to another era-- North by Northwest vintage Carey Grant, maybe, just come from fleeing a crop duster with his tie streaming out behind him. 

_Phil'd crack up at the idea of him as a matinee idol. I'll have to be sure to tell him._

The thought caught Clint off guard, and he stood with water sloshing about his waist, trying not to laugh at himself.

 _He's right here, he's actually right_ here. _Hell, just open your mouth and shout at him._

And then Phil straightened and saw him, and Clint's "welcome home" tumbled out of his mouth half-unconsciously as his heart stopped.

Somehow, he'd wandered into the kind of story where matinee idol ex-hermit spies stand around barefoot in the dune grass, being ruffled by the wind and looking down at people like they've just found the answer to the only important questions in the world. Clint wanted to move forward, he wanted to so badly-- to take Phil in his arms, push up under his jacket and burrow in as tightly as he possibly could. He vaguely recollected that there were more than sufficient reasons for him to do so-- reasons they both badly needed comforting.

But if he moved forward, if he held Phil in his arms, dripping eelgrass, he'd ruin Phil's suit. Might ruin _Phil_. It was too big a risk to take.

Or so _Clint_ thought. Phil, however, seemed to have a different agenda. He began moving again, stumbling down the dune, kicking sand up with each step, the hems of his trousers tangling about his ankles as he hit his stride. All the while, he was holding Clint's eyes, too far yet for Clint to read whatever message Phil was trying to send. He didn't even look down as his feet hit the water, waves rushing up to break over his ankles and dampen his gray suit to charcoal. 

The first wave that hit Phil amidships daunted him for a moment, and that was enough to break Clint's spell. He fumbled the wrench in his hand into the side pocket of his jeans, then started forward. The weak undertow dragged him back with each step, but he struggled forward.

Where they met, the water was waist deep, and churned to froth with the speed of their movements. Clint barely had time to register-- at last-- the desperate look in Phil's eyes, before Phil was on him, grabbing. One big hand wrapped his waist, the other cupped his cheek, thumb digging into his beard. Clint flung his own arms around Phil's shoulder and hip, and they pulled each other into the embrace.

After that the waves washed over them both, indiscriminate, while Clint chased Phil's mouth, relearning the warmth of his tongue, the click of his teeth, the brush of his nose against Clint's upper lip as they adjusted their angle. It wasn't enough-- or it was far too much. 

Clint wanted to break away, to pant himself back to sentience, to deal with the numbness encroaching on his feet and the wind chilling his shoulders wherever Phil's arms didn't reach. Each time he pulled back, though, he ended up ducking back in, for just _one_ more kiss, just the one last one he needed to survive being all of six inches away from Phil.

This went on for some time.

It went on long enough, at last, that their hands had wandered far from their original positions like travelers on a moonless night, finding their way by feel and memory. Clint clamped Phil's mouth to his with wet hands tucked tight around his jaw and the nape of his neck, while Phil's were everywhere at once, pressing at the small of Clint's back, his hip, the top of his ass, tugging him tighter and tighter till there was no space left for Clint to maneuver, there was just Phil-- cold, covered in soaked fabric that clung in the wrong places, and so damn hard Clint was gonna bruise his hips if he wasn't careful.

This was not an "it should be awkward, but really it's pretty hot" situation-- Clint had been in plenty of those. This was something far worse, because it _was_ awkward, it was damned uncomfortable and not in the least bit sexy-- except for the part where it was _Phil_. It was Phil and he'd been gone for too long, and if he moved one iota, let one more molecule of space come between them, Clint was going to do something utterly drastic, like lunge at him, and quite possibly drown them both in the process. Nothing in his past had prepared him for this. No one had ever told him, or hinted, that it was possible to feel quite so much like you'd fizzed out of your own skin and started to merge with another person.

The only thing keeping him from hyperventilating was that he was still kissing Phil, and he'd have to stop if he wanted to have a panic attack. 

Phil growled against Clint's lips, and it reverberated in Clint's jeans. Those, he was beginning to believe, had shrunk. They'd certainly grown unbearably tight over the last few minutes. As if that wasn't enough, Phil's hands were slipping down the back of them, wriggling their way down Clint's bare ass-- and letting frigid water wash over his waistband. 

"Mnnrgh!" Clint complained, and shivered as a fresh swell sloshed against his spine-- which seemed to give Phil the wrong idea entirely, as his fingers went exploring, letting still _more_ water in. Clint nipped his lip, hard, in an attempt to express displeasure without having to disengage and attempt to form words.

It backfired. Well, it _did_ provoke a reaction-- a happy grunt from Phil, closely followed by a fond squeeze, that faltered just a little at the end. Phil's fingers paused for a moment, then slipped down to Clint's tailbone and hooked. Clint ended up bucking against Phil at the tickle of a fingernail right at the top of his-- no, down further yet, and pinching. This elicited a helpless little whine from Clint and it wasn't fair, it was just going to encourage him, and Clint didn't want to do that... didn't... they needed to... it felt so _good_ though. Clint prepared himself for the inevitable: he was going to die of hypothermia right there in the October waters, too turned-on to save himself.

Then Phil withdrew his hand, leaving a slimy trail as he went.

"Here," he said, against Clint's teeth, and brought his hand up into Clint's peripheral vision. "Eelgrass in your pants."

Clint's release valve popped, and he felt laughter explode from him, full-throated, possibly even cackling. He went weak-kneed as the pressure building inside him dropped, and nearly collapsed as the next wave took him, falling heavily into Phil and rocking him backwards.

"Oh my god, Phil," he groaned. "No. That is... that should never have felt as good as it did. You're a horrible influence on me."

Phil hummed in response, and the sound buzzed warmly against Clint's temple, which was tucked against his adam's apple. 

"It's the other way around, I think. I don't wade out into the ocean in my suit for just _anyone_."

"Hell," Clint replied, "I don't think you _wear_ a suit for just anyone. Fuck, babe, you pretty much ruined that one, didn't you?"

He pulled back to look, and yes, Phil had a very distinct waterline forming about elbow-level, and it'd likely pick up a salt crust as it dried. 

"And it was my one surviving suit, after the rest got incinerated," Phil told him, trying to sound sorry about it-- failing, definitely failing, but trying hard. "Unfortunately, it's starting to get in the way of a lot of things I'd like you to get your hands on."

Clint wasn't about to argue; it was definitely time to move things out of the water-- before anything else eelgrass-related happened.

"I'm freezing," he said. "C'mon to shore with me and warm me up. Buoy maintenance is more of a job than I'd thought. My balls are gonna be the size of snails if we don't get them out of the water." 

"About that." Phil slung an arm about his waist as they waded to shore. "Why're you not wearing the wetsuit?"

"You've got a wetsuit?" Clint asked him, feeling horribly cheated. "Goddamn I could have used that." He could _see_ the moment when a mental image of himself in a sleek neoprene suit flashed through Phil's brain-- and travelled straight down to his dick.

"C'mon," he said again, and tugged them into a run. 

**Two**

Wool clung to his thighs, itchy and slimy at once, and Phil wanted nothing more than to claw it off himself. Clint had already attended to his tie, or tried to, using his teeth when his fingers proved unequal to the task. Between themselves they'd finally gotten it loose enough that he could tug it over his head. He tossed it away without a second glance; ugly damn thing anyway, more Holly's taste than his. Hell, it might have even _been_ Holly's.

 _I suppose I could give it back, now_ , he thought, and froze for a moment with his hands at his own belt buckle. 

"Hey. Babe." Clint's voice was rough, and he tugged Phil's chin back to him. "Eyes on me." Phil complied, and felt his lungs constrict at the look in Clint's face, lust warring with worry. "Y'okay?"

"Fine," Phil said, because in truth he was. Clint was there, alive and warm-- okay, alive and clammy-- against him. "Just... just cold."

"Well if you'd cooperate, I'd take care of that," Clint grumbled, but his face lightened, taking his entire beard with it. (And Phil decided he was fast coming to understand just why the prospect of him shaving had spurred Clint into action-- he was growing extremely fond of the way Clint's facial hair felt against his neck, his lips, his-- right. Yes. Pants.) 

"I don't think getting me naked here is going to warm me up," Phil teased him, hoping for exactly the response he got-- a kiss designed as much to shut him up as to turn him on. Clint was smiling through the kiss, teeth sleek against Phil's lips, and it tugged an answering grin from him.

"'Scuse me, Mr. Search and Rescue," Clint said when he pulled back, and he began to tug at the buttons on Phil's fly as he talked, "naked and sharing body heat is a _time_ -honored cure for hypothermia, and I'm disappointed in you if you don't know it. You need some remedial education."

"Oh?" Phil asked, and let himself be swept into the flow of banter gratefully, pushing everything else to the borders of his mind. "Is that what they teach you in SHIELD? Or was this part of your Fire Company training? Should I be jealous now?" Clint had his fly open now, and was shoving and tugging the damp wool down his thighs. The cold air that hit his exposed skin raised goosebumps, and Clint nuzzled them away, pulling back only when Phil's leg hair was thoroughly mussed. "What are you trying to do down there?" Phil asked, diverted.

"Figure maybe it's like fur; get it all fluffed up and you'll be warmer," Clint told him, and there went any last vestiges of anything besides absurd _joy_ filling up Phil's chest.

"I--" he began, and sighed as the trousers came all the way off and Clint ran nimble fingers down the arch of each foot, brushing them off, "oh, _Clint._ "

"C'mon down here and help me," Clint said, reaching up for his hands, "before these shrink up so far you've gotta cut 'em off."

"We can't have _that_ ," Phil responded, because telling Clint he'd go anywhere for him seemed like overkill. He suited his actions to his words, dropping to his knees and reaching for Clint's jeans. 

Getting Clint free in them was indeed a lesson in perseverance, and the proper application of torque. When he was stripped at last, Phil took care of both their shirts, then leaned back.

"Still cold," he said, and eyed Clint up well. All their manhandling had helped, but he was still blue-tinged at the very edges, and the fall sunlight was glistening over his shoulders and the light scatter of hair across his chest. The wound in his bicep was all but healed, soon to be just another scar in his collection, and Phil drew that first memory of Clint, naked among the storm-wrack, back to his mind's eye. 

The only thing the memory caused him was a pang of gratitude for everything that had followed.

Well.

"You're thinking again," Clint told him, and Phil shook his head.

"I'm admiring," he said, and smiled. "I'm probably going to do that a lot."

"You can do that as much as you want, babe," Clint replied, "once you get that blanket over us. Or have you forgotten you're cold?"

"I might've," Phil conceded, and reached for the blanket. 

"H'm, well," Clint allowed himself to be bundled down onto one of the blankets, then Phil flung the other over them. " _He_ hasn't forgotten." He reached down and tugged, and somehow his _hands_ , at least, were scorching where they played with Phil. 

"'S gonna if you keep that up," Phil groaned, and flopped over on top of him, dislodging Clint's hand. 

"Seems all right now," Clint agreed, somehow snuggling down under Phil and bucking up at the same time. One thigh snaked around Phil's thigh, and the other around his waist. Phil hooked hands under his shoulders and curved buried his face in Clint's neck. His breath blew back moist and hot against his face, and he licked the brine off the curve of Clint's jaw. 

This was what he'd been missing for two weeks, the chance to explore how the two of them fit together, sparks flying through their bodies where they thrust, building warmth that radiated to the tips of their fingers, toes, noses. Clint's hips should've come with a warning label, he thought vaguely, then lost himself in the rhythm as it picked up, rolling himself up against Clint with all the strength he could muster.

Here their so-recent immersion was a blessing; they were still slick, though the friction was drying them fast. Phil felt Clint shudder under him, then arch, chest pushing Phil up far enough that the blanket slid off his shoulders. Cold air filtered down his back and slithered along his ass. 

"Oh, _God_ ," he groaned, as his control broke, "oh, fuck, _Clint!_ " He wasn't sure if it was a thanksgiving to Clint for setting him on fire, or a plea for _more_ , for _anything_ , for every scrap Clint would allow him.

Clint reached up and kissed him, nodding as he did. 

"Gotchubabe," Clint muttered, whispered, and his hand left its desperate clutch on Phil's shoulder to travel down his hip and slide in between them. 

It was all over then but the shouting, Phil's shouting at least, driven out of him with every tremble of his thighs. To his delight, Clint managed a desperate, broken little groan as he came; Phil's name leaving his lips as if it'd been forced out by their thrusts.

 _Yes,_ Phil thought drowsily, _I'm definitely home._

\----

"There's sand in my ass crack now," Clint said a while later, and Phil sniggered inelegantly into his collarbone.

"Go back in the water then and wash it out," he said, and pulled the wool blanket more securely over them, rolling them up like the filling of a studel. "'S not my fault you couldn't stay on the blanket." He was profoundly uncomfortable; just as naked as Clint was in the cool autumn air, still vaguely damp, somewhat gritty about the edges, lips raw where Clint's beard had dug in, and itchy where the old army wool was rubbing against his bare ass.

And yet, he never wanted to move again.

"Phil," Clint told him, scootching until he could look Phil in the eyes, "it is _entirely_ your fault." His gaze was more challenge then reprimand, though, and Phil suddenly felt entirely _too_ warm, and too aware of his crotch pressed to Clint's, still slick between them and trending rapidly towards sticky. Clint kissed him then, firm and certain, a seal of approval as much as a mark of affection. "And it's time to go in," he finished.

They wandered back down the spit together wrapped in the blankets, carrying their sodden clothing and the lantern, and trailed by Lucky. He'd had the good grace to make himself scarce when they came ashore earlier and come bounding back when they were done, trailing seagull feathers from his lips.

Phil was almost in sight of the cottage before he remembered what he'd come racing down for-- what thoughts of Clint had driven from his mind.

He stopped short.

Clint saw him stopping, turned, and sighed.

"Shower first, babe," he said gently, and picked up Phil's shoes where they'd fallen. "But then, yeah, you and I need to have a long talk about that Corporal Hollis of yours. Did you ever tell me his first name?"

"Felix," Phil said. "He hated it."

"Ah," Clint sighed, "I was afraid of that."

Phil wondered if it was just his imagination, or if the wind had turned. It seemed so much colder, all of a sudden.

 

**Three**

 

"Here," Clint said, holding something out just at the edge of Phil's vision. 

He was so far gone in the past, which had started to creep up on him during his shower, that it took him a long moment to resolve the object in Clint's hand as a sandwich. When he finally did, Phil received it gratefully, taking a test nibble-- then a larger bite after he'd identified its component parts. Egg, cheese, and pork roll, tabasco sauce melting into the warm english muffin. Phil had a brief flashback to Clint picking crumbs of a nearly-identical sandwich off him in the parking lot just before he'd left for New York-- and been thrown headlong into an unwanted-- no, _unexpected_ new life. 

"Sorry," he rasped when he'd consumed half the sandwich, and finally managed to swallow. "Apparently I was hungry." Though he might regret eating, depending on how the coming conversation went.

"Figured you might be," Clint told him.

He folded himself down onto the dock next to Phil, letting his legs swing over the side, still-bare feet skimming just above the receding water. After he settled, he shifted the thermos of coffee Phil'd brought out with him, then poured himself a cup. Phil watched his eyes close in relief as he sipped, and tried to concentrate on the way his facial muscles relaxed, his eyelashes fluttered, and his lips twitched under his beard. Better to let himself get lost in the details, than think about what was coming.

"I ate mine while I was making yours. You good to talk now, or need a minute?"

 _Some reprieve._ Phil debated his answer, wondering if he'd ever be ready, even if the minute in question stretched to an eon.

"Or did I leave you to stew a little too long?" Clint asked, those sharp eyes sweeping over him with a kind of quiet sympathy that reminded him that Clint, at least, was used to the intensely bizarre. _Will I ever be able to take these things with his kind of poise?_

"I suspect you're about fifteen years late," Phil said, and swallowed. Clint shifted, rolling off one asscheek long enough to reach back and free something from his rear pocket. He held it out to Phil-- the polaroid of him and Holly, taken one of their post-War tours of the Gulf and left to moulder in a box for the last fifteen years, along with some letters from school kids and a long-forgotten Purple Heart; all memories of that era that Phil couldn't bear to toss but didn't especially want to look at ever again.

Phil made no move to take the photo from Clint's hands; somehow it was safer there, still at one remove, still buried in the past. The colors were faded now, yellowed and grayed, but he remembered the moment far too well. He and Holly had been in transit at the time, headed for Camp Doha on the Kuwait Bay. It had been taken at a moment of rest while the jeeps cooled, their nearly-overheated radiators clicking in the burning sun. Two good buddies posing for a picture. (That evening, Phil still remembered, they’d gotten leave, slipped away to Entertainment City, and wandered for hours before ending up somewhere in the bushes in the Provincial Garden, getting each other off under the trees even while they both grumbled that they should just find a hotel room.) 

He sighed. 

"Sorry he wasn't as dead as you thought," Clint said, and pulled the photo back, head coming up as he realized what he'd said. "I mean-- not that you wished he was-- fuck."

"Oh I know what you meant," Phil reassured him, chuckling weakly. "I promise. No, I..." he sighed. "I was just shocked. Who is he to you?"

" _That_ , Clint said, holding the photo up and staring directly into Holly's face, "was my old SO, and later CO, Senior Agent Felix Blake. Hero of the Battle of New York."

“That… that’s not… _possible_ Clint.” The moment he said it, Phil wanted to take the words back, say something so that he didn’t sound like such a damned cliche. Didn’t have Clint staring at him like he was entirely the idiot he felt like he was. “You said Blake’s dead,” he tried again, because perhaps this time Clint would understand, would take another look and get it right. 

"He is,” Clint said, his voice rough. “He died with a fucking intergalactic spear through his back, on the floor of the helicarrier. Phil, I knew Blake about a dozen years. This,” he shook the polaroid, “is Blake. Where'd you see a picture of him? Fury finally bring himself to put one up somewhere?"

_If you can’t trust Hawkeye’s eyes, who can you trust?_

"That's the problem." Phil reached out and laid a hand on Clint's thigh, squeezing for a moment, and he wasn't entirely sure whether it was to ground Clint or reassure himself of the solidity of important things in the world-- the wood under him, the water gurgling under the dock, Clint warm beneath his palm. "I saw him when I was released this morning, quite alive, talking with another agent."

Clint looked down at the photo again and shook his head, and as he shook, dismay engulfed his face, furrowing his brows. 

"No. Phil. No that's not... why would... he died. I saw the security footage. Fury called it. There was... it... shit. But.But that's _him_ , that's Blake-- I can't think of anyone else you could have seen. Unless he had a fucking identical twin.”

“No twins,” Phil replied, and closed his eyes. “Holly didn’t really have family, any more than I did.” The waves lapping against the palings of the dock sounded like they had the first day he’d come to North Bar, the day he’d promised himself he’d drown all memories of Holly. “No relatives at all closer than a third cousin.” Who got the flag draped over Holly’s empty casket, when they finally had the funeral. 

Clint closed his eyes and tilted his head back, letting a sad little laugh roll through him.

"Jesus fuck, when Fury compartmentalizes shit, he _really_ means it. Poor fucking Felix, I wonder what the hell they did to him. I wonder _why_ they did it." It wasn't exactly the reaction Phil had expected. _Is this what long exposure to SHIELD does to people? No sense of surprise left? At least he still has a sense of compassion._

Bless Clint, too, both for that-- for the instinctive thought for Holly's-- Blake's-- eh, Felix's-- own welfare-- and for trusting that Phil was neither hallucinating nor mistaken.

"I'm still stuck on the part where Holly's alive and well," he said, going back to the matter at hand because he wasn't sure how to articulate the mush of fondness he was feeling, "and living in SHIELD." 

He held out his hand, and after a moment Clint passed over the polaroid. Phil concentrated on it, the slick film, the nubbles at the edges, still faintly warm from Clint’s fingers. Holly’s bright smile, sharp at the corners, that seldom softened for anyone-- even Phil. The long line of his neck, streaked with sweat and dirt. Phil was standing next to him with a foolish smile on his lips, the distance between them calibrated to the millimeter to suggest _friends_ , not _lovers_. 

“You said you never got the body back, right? But Archstone was certain it was him? What happened over there?” Clint asked, his voice flat. "Phil?” 

“Ambush,” Phil said. “Or so I was eventually told. And kidnapping. They didn’t think to tell _me_ at first; I wasn’t family, and they wanted to keep it quiet in case there was a ransom demand. He shouldn’t have even been in Yugoslavia, it was too damn hot for any of us after Orlat. Archstone changed his assignment at the last minute. Said they needed his 'local expertise.'" The past was coming back in force now, racing up and over all Phil's careful breakwaters and levees. He heaved a breath, hoping to steady his voice before going on.

"They sent out search parties, then they sent out retrieval squads, then they found the mass grave, and then they stopped talking to me and only talked to his cousin. I’d wanted to bring Holly back home, at least…. Thought I’d failed him there, too. One last time. I guess... I guess... I guess he got home after all.”

His voice failed him after that.

Clint stirred. Phil felt more than saw when he got up, and closed his eyes. A moment later, his warm body settled down right next to Phil, pressing against his from ankle to hip, and he was pulled against soft jersey, his own _Loveladies Search and Rescue_ sweatshirt wrapped tightly against Clint’s big frame. Phil let himself be curled into Clint’s chest, his eyes still tightly closed, hands still on that damned photo. Clint took it gently from his grip.

\----

“Probably best,” Clint said after a little while, “If we try to keep going, get it over with.” 

He ought to have been pissed, at someone, at something-- maybe at Phil for not telling him more about Felix Hollis sooner-- not even his _first fucking name_. Maybe pissed at himself for not pressing, or at Tony Stark or Nick Fury for not having a picture of Blake _somewhere_ that Phil could have stumbled on. Anything to have this _not_ happen right now, not compromise Phil when he had to go back to the Tower, mask firmly in place, so soon.

A spark of frustration rolled through Clint, trying to find tinder. But the look of bewildered desolation on Phil’s face before the tears started gathering doused any possible anger.

“Yeah,” Phil said, still tucked against Clint, his cheek brushing Clint's shoulder as he formed the word. It was the only one; everything else seemed stuck inside his throat. 

Words were hollow now anyway; Clint wasn’t sure actions were much better but they were all he had-- and thank _everything_ he at least had those. He turned his head enough to bury his lips in Phil’s hair, nuzzling in. He wanted to wrap himself entirely around Phil, shield him from the past, from the ghosts crawling out from their far graves and threatening to pull them under. To pull _Phil_ under, specifically.

Clint was still fairly flabbergasted himself at the whole thing-- finding a literal SHIELD skeleton in the back of Phil’s closet had never seemed likely. _Should have, the number of dead SHIELD has produced in recent years._

That skeleton was Clint’s too properly, and he didn’t really _want_ to talk about it. Coming to grips with Blake's death, brought about in part by his own actions how _ever_ involuntary, had been a process of fits and starts and not an insignificant amount of alcohol. 

But their time together was limited to just that day, and even that might come with consequences. They couldn’t afford to leave a single stone unturned, and any and all further recriminations or bewilderment could just _wait_ for once. _Or anyway, let’s make sure they fall on the right heads. Fucking Fury, this compartmentalization bullshit is gonna be the death of me._

What happened if Blake recognized Phil, got suspicious, wanted to start digging around? Nothing, maybe-- Natasha was already digging, after all, and she was better than anyone. Maybe he found what Nat probably had-- that Phil had a lover on North Bar-- and left it at that. _Or maybe he keeps tugging, and all the threads start to unravel and Phil’s left standing naked in the middle of SHIELD._ Which… was a far more distracting mental image than he’d intended.

“Okay,” Clint said, to take his mind off it, “one of us has to talk, and it doesn’t look like you’re in shape to.” _Let’s get you inside and comfortable._ “So here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of Felix Blake, Agent of SHIELD.”

Phil looked up at him, and Clint forced reassurance onto his face. _C’mon, I can do the whole caretaking thing too, when I need. Just stay shut up and let me._ He pulled Phil to his feet, and started them towards the break in the dunes that led to the cottage.

He waited until he had them all the way inside and in the den before he continued.

“Blake was already at SHIELD when I came on, about twelve years back.” He levered Phil into his favorite armchair, and Phil looked up at him, watched his face as Clint helped him sit. 

“He was a just-minted senior agent; he got there fast, from what I heard. Favorite of Fury’s, who picked him up in some dark corner of the world. Fury wasn’t Director yet, but everyone figured he would be eventually. He was supervising me at the time-- he’d pulled me away from Garrett. When he got too senior to supervise juniors, he passed me on to Blake. I was first assignment as a supervising officer, poor bastard.” 

He sat down on the corner of the couch closest Phil’s chair and leaned over the worn leather arm, putting all his effort into telling the story, hoping it’d give Phil the distance to pull back into himself. 

"Didn't last long with Blake but that's 'cause they kicked me up to senior myself. But he was... fine. He was fine. No Fury, right? But he didn't ever think I hadn't earned my place and if Fury said I was good to do dumbass shit, then my dumbass shit was alright with him. Confused the fuck out of me sometimes." 

"How?" Phil said, rustling in his chair and leaning forward, and Clint conspicuously ignored all the signs of his improvement. _Let him come back up in his own time._

“Well take Nat,” he said with a deliberately breezy tone. “So Fury sent me and Blake to take her out, right? Only I made a different call, went rogue, and then went over Blake’s head to Fury to ask him to recruit her.” He paused there a moment, remembering Natalia Romanova as she’d been at the time; all lean bones and big eyes and red, red hair, intent on seducing him into being her savior. She _had_ , of course. Nat could get him to do anything, most days. Only somewhere along the way, he’d convinced her to talk to Nick Fury, and Nick Fury had convinced her salvation lay in the long glass corridors of SHIELD. And when Natasha Romanov joined SHIELD, any chance there’d ever been that Clint would walk away died. Even when they’d been on opposite sides of the world, they’d tethered each other. When they’d walked away from SHIELD, the ties had remained.

Until now, anyway. 

_Whose damn fault is that?_

“What did Fury say?” Phil’s voice cut through his thoughts, and Clint realized he’d lapsed into silence.

“The single best assassin in the world at that time? He said yes, is what he said, and tried not to drool too hard.” 

“And… Blake?” The name came out thin on Phil’s tongue, like he was tasting chalk. Maybe he was, too. 

“ _Blake_ I figured would refuse to speak to me ever again, after that. He wasn’t a rule-follower so much as a company man, if you get me, but he had his pride, and it’d damn well been hurt. But, no, he just said ‘you owned the mess yourself, you got Fury on your side; I appreciate you keeping me out of it. But you owe me 20 bucks for the emergency Prilosec refill.’ And that… was that.”

“That was Holly all over.” Phil nodded thoughtfully and bent forward, clasping his hands between his knees. He was mostly recovered now, Clint noticed, though still wan. His eyes were trained somewhere just beyond his linked thumbs-- probably about fifteen years in the past, if Clint was reading him right. “Much was forgiven if you just got the job _done_. Held himself to those standards, and they were high. Liked to pretend he was just being logical, but underneath? I don’t know…” The hands tensed, knuckles whitening, and Phil closed his eyes. “The one thing you never wanted to do was fail if you took the risk.” 

“No shit,” Clint laughed. “We lived in terror. I did, anyway. Nat, I think her standards were pretty compatible. I only got reamed out a couple times, but they haunt me to this day. Amazed it was that few.”

“I’m not.” Phil opened his eyes straight into Clint’s gaze, and every cell in Clint’s body stilled for a moment. _There’s my Phil. That’s it, babe. Come back to me._ Then Phil broke the contact, put his hands on his knees, and pushed himself up. Each muscle rolled into place, until he was again himself, compact, put-together, capable, and with a fluidity of movement that stole Clint’s breath. “I’m glad he got that,” Phil said quietly. “Friends he could respect. Maybe that’s why.”

“Why what?” Clint asked, standing too.

“Why he was going to leave me,” Phil said, “I knew he was planning it, even though he never said anything. He wouldn’t have, either, he’d have just slipped out of my life as best he could. I just never expected him to be quite so _thorough_ about it,” and walked into the kitchen.

\----

The shuffle of Clint’s sock-clad feet announced his arrival in the kitchen doorway, and Phil didn’t have to look back to know he’d have crossed those broad, corded arms over that barrel chest. In fact, it was far better not to look; his defenses were all down to rubble already. He let Clint stand there in speaking silence, while he hunted through his cupboards until he found a half-empty box of tea, one Lauren Halliday had given him years back.

Finding it would have taken half the time if he’d been looking with his eyes, but those were fixed on points in the past: Holly in his arms cursing while he bled from a gut wound, Holly in the dim light of dawn on a hill overlooking the Adriatic, Holly drooling in his sleep in their bed in Park Slope, Holly in a suit looking back at him from the gate at JFK with no smile on his face. 

While Clint had talked, he’d tried to imagine Holly older, Holly in SHIELD tac gear or one of those anonymous every-Agent suits SHIELD was currently making for Phil himself. Holly sardonically accepting Clint’s shenanigans-- just as long as they came off. It should have been easier to translate him to the new settings; fifteen years of Holly dead, Holly in an anonymous grave, had blurred his face more than Phil had realized.

“Shit,” he said, when he realized he was clutching the tea box to his chest, squashing it. Clint stirred behind him, and Phil risked a glance back over his shoulder. Just Clint, in Phil’s jeans and Phil’s socks and Phil’s sweatshirt, no phantom ex-lovers in kevlar glaring over his shoulder. Clint raised an eyebrow.

“I showed you mine,” he said lightly, and straightened. 

Phil felt the words press against his back teeth, but when he opened his mouth, no sound came out. 

“I’ll get mugs while you put the kettle on?” Clint offered, “and you tell me whether Fury and May knew about… about you two?”

That gave Phil enough to start with, and he nodded gratefully.

“He never knew,” he said, “none of them did. If there was anything our platoon agreed on, it was that we were the two most blank-faced motherfuckers they’d ever seen. Point of pride.” He held the box out to Clint, who came forward into the kitchen far enough to take it, allowing Phil to stay where he was and concentrate on boiling water. Even that seemed almost too much to ask of his self-control at the moment. 

“But they knew you were friends, right? I mean, c’mon-- you were obviously friends.” Clint’s back was to Phil, and he was pulling mugs down from the hook on the wall, examining them carefully for specks and scratching thoughtfully at one bit. He must have caught Phil reviewing the dishes after he’d finished washing them, one night-- Clint’s standards of cleanliness weren’t exactly his own, but he didn’t think he’d been quite that obvious about it.

Or maybe Clint just noticed these things. 

He wondered, briefly, if Clint’d felt the same little twist of shame that Phil had, when Felix had pointed out his own dishly shortcomings after they moved in together.

Hell-- he wondered if Felix had ever had cause to point them out to _Clint._

“Yeah, he’d have had to be blind-- entirely blind-- and deaf not to have noticed we were friends,” Phil said, to get his mind off the sudden urge to pull the mug from Clint’s hands and kiss him until he forgot about whatever flecks of dirt he thought he saw. “Felix and I met during the Gulf War-- first one, now, obviously. He was a transfer-in; we were in separate platoons for a while. First worked together on a rescue mission just over the border, and apparently command liked our work well enough, or Felix liked our work well enough, that when we got promoted we ended up assigned together. I don’t know about him-- thought I did, obviously-- but _I_ thought we were unstoppable together. Well, you do when you’re young.” He wanted to keep going and power through before the memories dragged him under again, but his breath was growing short.

“I kinda got that from the picture.” Clint set the mugs down next to him and peeled two tea bags apart. He hovered next to Phil as Phil poked at the kettle on the stove, not quite touching him. Every gesture was full of a careful grace, as if he and Phil were partners in some dance so complex it failed to look like a dance at all. 

He’d have to examine that in more detail later. For now, he could feel his shoulders relaxing from Clint’s mere proximity, enough, at least, so that he could go on talking.

“I couldn’t point to quite when I went from just thinking of him as my friend-- my damn _hot_ friend-- but in quarters that close, and that much danger, that often? Well-- you know. How intimate you become when you’ve killed together. When you’ve both worn the same person’s brains.” 

The kettle was whistling, and Phil shut off the stove. When he looked up again-- when he dared to look up, Clint wasn’t actually looking at him, or anything else in the cottage. His eyes were closed, his mouth twisted in something that might have been a smile except that it was about ten times too ironic. 

“Of course something happened," Phil said, watching him, "and then happened again, and by ‘95 we were together. I mean, for the given sense of ‘together’ that means ‘fucking where you think no one’s gonna find you.’ Started to work with SHIELD then-- once without Marcus, then one op with him, then suddenly SHIELD wanted us and _only_ us when they needed to work with the Army. Holly wasn’t as close to Marcus as I was, but… I’d consider they were friends. Holly was with us in Orlat; helped me get May out of it and back to Marcus.”

“Well,” Clint said thoughtfully, stepping out of the way as Phil poured hot water, “explains why Fury’d recruit him-- hell, probably didn’t think twice about it. Not given the way he flung you to the tigers in Avenger’s Tower. You must have done _something_ to impress him.” He twitched a mug towards him, one finger hooked around the handle, and hunkered down to let the steam rise into his face. 

“ _Clint_ ,” Phil found himself sighing, and felt the last of the nightmares slough off him, flaking away as the morning sunlight and the brightness in Clint’s eyes hit them. 

“Right here, babe,” Clint breathed. He leaned forward through the veil of steam and kissed Phil, just a short peck. Then he chuckled. “Is it okay that I wish Fury’d recruited you too? That I’d have met you in SHIELD? Even though you’d have _hated_ me?”

Phil thought about a young Clint, not yet mellowed, fierce and barely contained, and decided he probably wouldn’t have survived it. 

“It’s okay with me,” he said, swallowing hard. “And I can’t imagine I’d have hated you. But I don’t think you would have been impressed.”

“Phillip Coulson,” Clint admonished him, “I was a young punk with more attitude than brains, and I thought the only way to get people to respect me was to argue with them. You _would_ have hated me. And I would have lusted over you so hard SHIELD’d have to hire more janitors to mop the drool up. I was an idiot, but not that much of an idiot.” He forgot about the tea and pulled Phil to him, hip-first. 

Phil was glad to go, to roll himself into Clint, come hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder and lip to lip like they’d been made to each other’s measure.

“Well, at least we’re here now,” he said, leaning in to take another kiss and complete his own cure. At this rate, he wasn’t going to need the tea to feel scalded inside and out. 

“Yeah, and I suppose if you’d been recruited then you’d still have been with Blake,” Clint frowned. Phil waited to feel the chill creep back up his bones, and was mildly shocked when it failed to happen. He just felt a little tired. 

“Not by the time Fury got to Felix, we wouldn’t. Maybe if we’d come directly from the Army. But that was less likely, with Fury off pretending to be dead that year. Among other things. Clint, is that common for SHIELD?”

“No,” Clint told him, “because it’s hell to undo, y’know? And rarely as useful as people seem to think. But it happens. Hell, given that whole ‘we thought you were dead’ thing never comes up again if you die while you’re busy pretending to be dead, maybe it actually happens a lot. It’d make sense for Blake, just… is it possible that the first time around that’s what he was doing, too? Faking his death for some mission?”

Phil tasted the idea with his mind, and decided it was horribly bitter, with a side of acidic. Bad enough if Holly’d been assumed dead and just decided not to come back, that he didn’t even owe Phil that much. But if he’d _planned_ it? Walked out of Phil’s life with their life together left only half-undone? 

“It’s possible. I don’t see why, but-- oh, hell,” Phil blanched as the thought occurred to him, “that’s what Fury meant, when he told me he’d asked about recruiting me and I’d seemed… he asked Felix when he recruited _him_. He must have. But, if Felix is currently supposed to be so deep cover everyone thinks he’s dead, what was he doing at SHIELD this morning?”

“He was there at three in the morning, Phil, not exactly a heavy traffic time. But yeah, I take your point. Fuck,” Clint sighed. “I don’t see how you get out of this without talking to Fury. If for no other reason than, well, he’s _Blake_ , Phil.” Clint hadn’t let go of him, and Phil could feel the shudder that went through him. “When he died trying to stop Loki? Fury used that. To motivate Tony and Steve-- or so Nat tells me. Reminded them what the cost of them arguing was, that SHIELD was going to be right there with them, dying, as we fought off aliens and gods. Tony still doesn’t talk about Blake, much. And I--” he stopped and shook his head, burying it in Phil’s shoulder suddenly, “I--”

The phone’s ring had never been quite so shatteringly loud before. It broke the two of them apart, and they each stared at it, wide-eyed, for a long moment. It rang again, and again. Finally, Phil grabbed it before it could start to rattle off its base like it would in a cartoon.

“Hello?” he said, voice rough.

“God _damn_ it, Phil,” Fury’s voice came in high and hot over the line, “What the hell are you doing down there? This is _not_ the weekend, you did _not_ request leave, and for fuck’s sake, you’re a SHIELD agent now, d’you know what we immediately think when you go AWOL? We think someone _fucking killed you._ ”

Clint cringed and stared at Phil, who was fighting the urge not to fling the phone right through the window. It was tempting-- especially when followed up with the brief fantasy of throwing some clothes and the odd chicken or two in his suitcase, then tossing the cases, his dog, and Clint into Lola and motoring off to find the nearest international waters.

“ _Coulson_ ,” Fury growled, “talk to me.”

“Oops,” Phil said.

 **Four**

Four chickens and a dog were gathered at the door to the back porch when Skye came up to it, and she paused for a moment on the steps. They turned to look at her as one, a mass of rustling wings and golden fur, and she sighed.

“Is Clint not here to let you in, or what?” she asked, and reached for the handle of the door. As she did, a voice drifted out, and her fingers froze on the handle. It was high and clipped, controlled in a way that made her want to back right straight down the stairs, before whoever was talking turned into a black hole and sucked everything in.

“... days stuck in that sterile prison, I am more than owed this.... Oh yeah? Because seems to me you didn’t have any problem sticking _this_ agent with extra time when Victoria Hand was sick….” 

_Well, hey, boss, hell of a homecoming,_ Skye thought, then squared her shoulders and opened the door. Lucky was snaking through before she had it half open, and two of the chickens squeezed in right after. The other two balked at the sound of Phil’s voice, unmuffled as it suddenly was.

“... wasn’t even expected back until tomorrow, Agent Triplett is covering. Are you saying he’s not competent to--” 

Skye had the door all the way open now, and as she raised her eyes from the chickens, she realized both Phil and Clint were staring at her. Clint was leaning his ass against the kitchen counter. He had his arms draped around Phil’s waist and his chin on Phil’s shoulder, half-covering it with beard, as Phil sniped into the phone. They each raised an eyebrow, practically in unison, and Skye hadn’t felt so uncomfortably exposed since they’d found her in the bunker.

“Hi,” she mouthed, adding a little wave. Phil gestured her inside impatiently. He was still talking on the phone, and Clint was clearly listening in, so she shuffled herself off to the little nook next to the oven as quietly as she could.

“-- yes, I agree, I should have said something, but anyone could have--” Phil rolled his eyes, and Clint turned to nip at his earlobe.

 _Oh god, please tell me I missed the worst of the reunion._ Skye made to shuffle herself in further, and ended up running into the little black hen-- because of course it was Tasha who'd gotten inside, again. Tasha squawked and hopped out of the way. Phil looked down at her, then up at Skye, with outrage written on his face.

“Sorry boss,” she mouthed again, holding up her hands. As if it was fair to blame her-- Clint was the one who’d gotten them used to having the run of the kitchen.

“-- no, that was just a chicken. In my kitchen.... Am I committed to-- damnit, Nick, if I weren’t I wouldn’t be there. It’s a hell of a lot to ask of a man, for him to immediately give up the life he spent fifteen years building. I come back here and find my cousin half drowned trying to take care of the damned.... Well, if you won’t make _allowances_ I’ll just damn well hand in my notice now.” Clint stiffened as Phil said that, and so did Skye.

_Well it’s one way out of this mess. But… but c’mon! Avengers! Access! Boss-- no!_

“Well that’s entirely up to you.” Phil’s voice had taken on such a deceptively pleasant tone that she expected to find that Clint had turned to ice, wrapped around him. “Yes, well, please tell them I’m sorry to have worried them. I’ll be back in time for tomorrow morning’s round. If my meeting with the Director of SHIELD goes well, that is.”

Skye slipped over to the kitchen table and set her laptop bag down, still looking carefully back at the two men. Clint watched her do it, and gave a miniscule nod, and a thumbs-up that was more than slightly complicated by the fact that his fingers were wrapped around Phil’s, and Phil’s knuckles had gone white.

“... I agree that there’s nothing else to say. On this point. You and I have another thing to talk about. Yes, I’ll see you tomorrow. Seven AM. I can do that. Now, unless there’s anything else, I’m going to go enjoy my chickens.”

Clint caught Phil’s hand just as he was about to toss the phone, and removed it from his grip. He didn’t look as he set it back in the cradle, just tucked his head down against Phil’s neck and kissed him. 

It was _amazing_ how interesting Skye’s laptop had become suddenly.

“Good morning, Skye,” Phil said after a moment, his voice back down in his normal register, maybe a little bit torn about the edges. She risked a glance up. He was staring down at her, looking stern-- or trying to; really, he was kind of tattered at the edges all over. 

“Heya, boss,” she said, and decided at the last moment to redact the bit where she said _didn’t expect to see you down here_ because yeah, clearly no one had. 

“Thank you for the invasion,” he said, indicating the chickens Clint was currently trying to herd back out the door. Tasha was currently employing her best chicken evasive maneuvers. Cousin Emily would toddle on docilely enough for about four steps, before veering wildly. 

“Um,” she said, “welcome?”

That earned her a little nod, and a smile that was a fraction more Phil-like. 

“Perhaps you can help clear it out,” he said, and Skye looked from him, to the chickens, back to him, then closed her eyes and slumped back in the bench seat, as a wave of relief turned her spine to jelly. _We didn’t lose him. We didn’t have to go break him out of a secret super-duper max prison. Oh my god, boss._

“Skye? Are you okay?” he asked, as if _she_ were the one who might be in some kind of trouble here, and that was it. Skye leapt up before she thought about it, and flung herself straight at Phil.

He went stiff as her arms wrapped around his neck, and if she’d been a little less desperate, a little less on the knife’s-edge of release now that, temporarily, she could let go, she might have cared. As it was, she just clung.

“Skye?!” His hands came up, after a moment, to pat awkwardly at her back. “What is--”

“I am _so_ glad you’re back, boss,” she muttered into his collar. Behind her, Clint chuckled.

“All right,” Phil said, and he softened against her for a moment, warm in away she thought a bear might be, if you could ever get close enough to hug one and live to tell the tale. “All right.” It wasn’t much more than a whisper. 

He levered her away after another minute, and Skye let herself go. The kitchen was clear; Clint had finished his hen-herding. He was latching the door to the porch, fingers sliding along the decorative gingerbread lining the wooden frame, and looking back at them.

“This is normally our morning meeting time, Phil,” he said softly. “Plans for the day and all that. Kate and America are usually here, though,” he turned to Skye quizzically and she bit back the urge to say something about not herding girls, just chickens.

“We had an idea about Quinn's yacht. She'n America went to Atlantic City to see if it'd pay out. And maybe to get a little nookie.” She shrugged, and sat back down at the laptop. “More in the debrief. Anyway, it’s just the three of us,” she continued, and struggled to keep the satisfaction out of her voice. This was the way she liked it; just her and her two bosses, against the world. 

“Well then,” Phil said, sitting down himself and leaning forward, and a twinkle came back to his eye, “tell me everything.”

Skye happily did just that. She filled him in on everything that had happened while he was gone while Clint wandered off to take care of North Bar’s chores. Skye carefully didn’t watch him watch Clint’s ass as he left, because it was great that they’d figured out the whole romance thing, but they were both too damn old to be looking at each other as if they wanted to use their teeth to remove all their clothing.

 _Oh god, no, that wasn’t a mental image I wanted._

She lost herself in her task, taking Phil over her frustration with the yacht, recounting with waving hands how Doc Halliday had carried Kate off to the Preservation Society meeting the day before, and walking him through all the minute details of the data he'd smuggled out of SHIELD in a keychain. It was gratifying to watch Phil’s face relax, his shoulders unslump, and color return to his face with every passing minute he spent sitting with her. They moved out to the front porch eventually, watching the wind pass through the drying grass and the dead stalks of dusty miller as they talked, and the shadows pass and shorten, then start to lengthen again, along the edges of the cottage.

Clint came and went, bringing Lucky, and came again in time for lunch. Skye watched Phil melt just a little more as he came bounding up, emerging from the path between the dunes like he’d stepped out of a Lifetime classic movie, all manly beard and worn jeans and bare toes and sparkling smile and stupid arms. 

“It’s good to be home for a little,” Phil murmured, and Skye wondered if he was just talking about North Bar-- or if he even knew, himself.

\----

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time on Washed Ashore: Kate encounters complications, Natasha contemplates her options, and Fury comes clean(ish). Posts Nov. 9-- see Posting Note below.
> 
> Tumblr-bonus-that's-not-on-tumblr: Did you know there’s no Phil Coulson/Felix Blake anywhere on AO3? There is, however, [this](https://twitter.com/clarkgregg/status/425676919212740608/photo/1), which the evil Faeleverte sent to me back when I first told her about Felix "Holly" Blake, with the comment "Once upon a time, Phil dreamed this was what his wedding picture would look like."  
> ETA: and a double bonus, check [this post](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/17685434) for how Holly would have looked back in the day.  
> A posting note, copied from Tumblr:
> 
> I suspect some of you have seen this coming. I’ve seen it coming and didn’t want to admit it.
> 
> Chapter 16 underwent mitosis this week and all the other chapters have re-arranged themselves as a result. It forced a decision I’d been noodling anyway. After this week’s post, Washed Ashore will move to posting every two weeks. The next post will be Sunday, Nov. 9.
> 
> I really didn’t want to have to stretch out the posting schedule; I want this story finished! But the chapters are running 10,000+ words more often than not, and I honestly have the ability to write about 8,000 good words a week. You do the math. Plus, the Dinosaur Train crew’s been spending too much time with my daughter, and I too little. And my long-suffering beta, faeleverte, is already swamped with her own work and deserves time to breathe. (Plus, I’d hate to delay Male Order Bride. Have you read it? Read it!.) 
> 
> So— every two weeks for the month of November, and then I’ll re-evaluate. At the least, that will give me time to get Washed Ashore to you with the quality you deserve and give my household the amount of attention it deserves— something our Clint and Phil would agree is important. With luck, that will also allow me to work on Phillip, the next part of Chris, here and there so that I can keep close to schedule with that. 
> 
> I’ll try to do as I’ve done— post sneak peaks on the off-Sundays. So, since I still owe you guys a chapter this week, I’m off to edit.


	17. Hailing Distance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone's either having sex, falling in love, or spying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: vengeful chicken naming.
> 
> Man, there's a lot of sex in this one. Scene Two is Clint/Phil. Scene Five is AmeriKate. Skipping to the first set of dashes in each scene will give you the plot without the porn.

**One**

It was well before dawn when the alarm on Phil's phone went off. Not that Clint recognized it as such, not at first.

All he knew was that something was making a racket, and it was near at hand, far too modern and _buzzy_ to ever be allowed on North Bar. It was hurting his ears, it was hurting his sense of propriety, and he was going to find it and stop it at all costs.

He rolled over, one hand out and groping, and ran right into a warm, smooth mass of sleeping Phil. Clint's thoughts momentarily derailed, thrown off track by the sudden snoutful of Phil-scent he'd inhaled. His hips had rolled right into Phil's rear, and were already nestling in without his conscious direction. Clint slotted in quite nicely, he'd discovered the night before, and his body clearly had firm opinions about trying it again.

 _zeeet zeeet zeeet zeeet zeeet_ said the phone, like an electronic mosquito, and Clint reached out reflexively to slap at it. His arm was about an inch too short, so he ended up futilely patting the cool linen sheet next to the edge of the bed while the phone buzzed itself into a frenzy on the night table.

Clint was determined, however, and began to inch himself up and over Phil to get at his quarry.

Phil, finally sensing disturbance, rustled. 

"Ngh?" he asked, and Clint sighed.

"Turn off your alarm, Phil," he said.

"M'larm?" Phil shifted, but _not_ the way Clint wanted him to go. Instead of turning off the sonic torture device, he twisted at his waist and stretched up. Clint could feel his lips searching for Clint's in the dark.

"Alarm," Clint said against his teeth, when Phil finally found what he was looking for. "Off. Then kiss."

"Mnn, kiss first," was his response, and Phil continued his imitation of a sloth, wrapping his limbs around the convenient tree branch of Clint.

"Damnit, Phil, how are you not noticing this? It's horrible," Clint replied, and shoved himself up and over Phil, finally stretching far enough to swipe at the phone.

The buzzing stopped.

Also, Clint realized, he was straddled on top of Phil, and Phil's nose was digging into his chest. 

Phil was taking advantage of the position to learn Clint's pectorals by mouthfeel.

"Babe." The word came out of his mouth far more cottony than intended, between lust and fondness and the morning. "Not that I'm not-- God!" he broke off as Phil's teeth found a nipple, and Phil smiled around his bite. This new Phil Coulson, playful in his bed and confident in his handling of Clint, was nearly enough to sweep Clint under, but he fought against it.

"Not that I don't... jeez... that's... no...." The tongue had come out to play now, and Clint fought to keep from bucking straight into Phil's bellybutton, or out of the firm grip Phil'd gotten around his hips. "I mean... I'm happy to, but... Phil!"

"Yes?" Phil sighed, finally seeming to decide that it would be easiest just to communicate.

"Didn't you need to go back to New York?" Clint hated to bring it up; hated the thought of leaving this bed and this man he was wrapped up in. Knew that as soon as Phil shifted, taking the warmth of his chest hair and the almost intoxicating press of his body away, Clint was going to freeze. But it didn't change the fact that Phil had a seven AM meeting with Director Fury, and New York was over two hours away.

"'Ventually," Phil mumbled, breath hot against Clint's skin, and then he dragged Clint down by the hips, or maybe wriggled himself upwards, until he could meet Clint in a kiss-- a sloppy one, since it took a moment for Phil's lips to find his quite properly.

It should be noted, at this moment, that Phil did indeed have morning breath, stale about his tongue. It should also be noted that Clint entirely and completely failed to give a fuck.

"Okay but," Clint panted when he backed off, squirming himself down Phil's body until he could press their foreheads together and feel Phil's chest rise and fall against his own. "You don't want to be late."

"Not gonna be late, babe," Phil told him, and nipped at his ear. "Told you last night I still had plans for you. And I do." 

He had, too. He'd described them in sleepy fragments, as they lay together under the blankets, fully sated and nearly unconscious. Clint hadn’t been sure he'd remember, or that he hadn’t been talking in his sleep. Clint had a lot to learn still, clearly. 

"Set the alarm so I'd have time," Phil continued, running one hand up over his ribs then scratching his way back down. Divorced of visual clues in the dark, each touch hit Clint with an extra shock. 

"Time?" Clint asked, and began his own program of nipping along Phil's collarbone, on the assumption-- quickly proven correct-- that Phil'd enjoy it just as much on the receiving end. "Time for what?"

"Mmm," Phil said. And then he tipped his hip up, and flipped them both over. "Time to fuck you into this mattress so hard you'll never leave it again." Then he rolled the considerable, addictive length of his body along Clint's, a clear preview of the coming attraction, and every nerve in Clint's body sat up and begged.

"Wow," Clint replied, trying desperately to maintain a flippant tone. _Where the hell did this Phil come from? And how do I make him stay?_ "You get forceful when you know you've got a guy right where you want him, don't you?"

Phil's only response was a chuckle, and another roll of hips, before he nudged Clint's thighs open with his own and hunkered further down between them. Clint settled in, looping his ankles loosely around the backs of Phil's knees, and wished he could see Phil's face right now. Even in the pitch blackness, he was certain it was radiating smug; Clint could feel the residual heat.

"Pays to be blunt," Phil told him, "since last time I invited you into my bed, you didn't apparently get the full message. I feel like I need to make things extremely clear." He punctuated that with a pointed dig, and Clint wasn’t sure how he was managing to speak clearly, given how hard he was.

"Oh, babe," Clint said, trying to push his own arousal down for a moment. 

He hadn't expected Phil to take it so hard last night, when he found out that Clint hadn't been sleeping in the attic room; he'd stayed in the little guest room on the rickety daybed downstairs. Clint had _thought_ he'd explained at the time, but maybe he hadn't been clear enough; he'd been distracted after all, what with Phil rapidly becoming naked in front of him.

"Look, when I said... fuck... when I said I wasn't sure it was all right, I didn't... ohhhh... it wasn't you... ah... ah!... _for fuck's sake Phil, put that tongue back in your mouth for one minute I'm trying to be coherent here._ " Clint hauled Phil back by the scruff of his neck before he quite realized what he was doing. Phil grunted at him, but went, and Clint regretted the move as his chest started to chill, especially around the wet marks left by Phil's tongue.

"It's really all right," Phil was saying, his body gone still with Clint's grip on his hair. His voice was so warm it was nearly a source of light. "Clint, I don't expect...."

"Shut. Up.” Clint said, because damn him, he had every _right_ to expect things. “I suck at talking, so don't... don't make me stop. Okay?" Phil nodded against his hand, and Clint wished for a little light (as opposed to that horrible overhead arc lamp thing) to see his expression by. Failing that, he mooshed Phil down against his chest. "I knew you wouldn't mind if I slept up here-- though if I knew you'd been beating off to it...."

"Not... that's... I didn't say...." Phil's cheek felt suddenly warm against his skin, which Clint took as proof that he _had_ , even if he hadn't said it. It was an affecting realization, and he hoped Phil was in a position to feel that. 

"Anyway," Clint continued once Phil had stuttered to a stop, "I just thought moving up here was... it felt too final, somehow." He did catch Phil's little intake of breath at that. _Shit._ "No! Not like that. Not like..." _Not like what, huh?_

His mouth kept going even as his brain stopped. "What I meant is: happy to sleep in your bed but... It felt like it was the last step to you not coming home. It's stupid, I know. But. I'm maybe superstitious about things. Does that make sense?" 

Phil shook his head, his temples ruffling Clint's beard, and Clint fought against the sudden urge to purr at the sensation. 

"Like, look-- I'd already jinxed us enough with the condoms, right? Sleeping in your bed was... it was gonna make sure you never came home to share it with me. Anyway it just... it felt like if I slept up here, it'd be me taking your place. Saying I was Keeper now and you were gone for... for good and that, um, I didn't think that'd go over well." 

Ah. There. That was a little more like it. Good work, mouth.

Clint hoped that was enough, because he didn't think he could manage to explain the inchoate sense of wrongness that had bubbled up in him when he'd taken the stairs that first night without Phil. He _had_ taken Phil's pillow down to his own room, however. That much, at least, he'd dared, muttering promises under his breath that he'd bring Phil home, that the island hadn't lost him yet.

It was just possible the solitude had been getting to him.

"Clint?" Phil said against his chest, and his mouth was spreading to a smile. Clint could feel it on his collarbone. "If _I_ move your pillows and clothing up here, would that make it all right?"

"... yeah?" Clint said after a moment, wondering if his blush was translating in the dark the way Phil's had, and Phil chuckled.

"All right. May I go back to what I was doing now?" he asked.

For an answer, Clint scooched down far enough that he could bring Phil's lips to his own, and kissed him hard. It wasn't that he had-- really-- doubted that Phil would have wanted him invading Phil's bed, but it was amazing what that confirmation did to him, turning his knees to jelly even while horizontal.

"Anyway," Phil said, after a moment spent exploring Clint's teeth with his tongue, "I'm glad you got the condoms, even if it was pushing your luck. And all the gossips from Harvey Cedars on north. They’re handy things to have, condoms." He paused, lips hovering over Clint's, and his voice faltered. "And I'm glad you understand about exorcising demons."

Taking the two thoughts in combination, Clint figured that was about as close as Phil was going to get to confession about last night. 

About why he'd dragged Clint upstairs after dinner, pulled them both onto the bed, and clung to Clint, not letting him up until Clint had taken his mind and all the control he’d fought over the course of the day to regain, and left him in pieces. How he’d pleaded with Clint for more, for harder, for deeper, as Clint hovered over and slammed into him so hard even the memories brought stars to Clint's eyes. 

It hadn't been at all what he'd expected from Phil or from the second wave of their reunion. And Clint had spent a lot of time imagining being back in this bed, with this man. Not that he was complaining; not that he thought he’d _ever_ complain about anything they did in this bed (well-- short of shepherdess and sexy priest; costume was _not_ one of Clint’s kinks.) If what Phil had wanted last night, though, was to have Clint fuck any last remaining vestiges of Felix Hollis out of him, well-- Clint had been more than happy to oblige. 

"Phil," he said, and then had no idea how to continue. _You're not his. You're mine._

No. Well-- yes! But no. 

He shook his head, temple still pressed against Phil's, and tried again, desperately ignoring the way Phil’s knees were curling in under him, nudging under his thighs and spreading him further. 

"Phil, I--" _need you to stay here. Failing that, I need you to come home safe to me again._

Closer. 

"Phil... God. Phil, babe," Phil hummed encouragement and slid one hand down his ass, pressing his hips up. Clint's words finally unstuck: "Oh my god, Phil, get the goddamn condoms and get _in_ me already!" 

It wasn't _exactly_ what he'd meant to say, but it was fervent enough, ardent enough, and certainly true. And it made Phil laugh, a low and promising rumble that reverberated through Clint's ribs and all the way down to his toes.

"Yes, sir," Phil said, and disengaged, leaving Clint feeling cold, bereft, and so lonesome in the soft dark. He was back quickly enough though, pressing a bottle into Clint's hand with a murmured "hold this," and covering Clint with all his furry length.

And if Phil _did_ have to leave before the break of dawn, at least Clint would have memories of this to keep him warm in the big attic bed at night: Phil teasing him open, pads of his clever, strong fingers pressing and dipping and flexing as if Clint were an instrument and he'd played since his youth. The solidity of his body covering Clint's, strong enough that Clint could writhe and flex and still be safely pinioned beneath him. The high, nasal shudder, followed by a soft little catch deep in the back of Phil's throat as he thrust home, echoing inside Clint's ribcage. And above all else, Phil, hot and heavy and wide and perfect, moving inside him, leaving him achingly lonely and filling him, completing him, over and over and over again, until finally Clint gave up, pulled Phil's hand down to wrap around and give Clint the few strokes he needed to finally, finally let _go_. 

His body shook apart, convulsing, and he cried aloud with a voice that felt entirely new, only barely recognizable as his own.

Phil followed after him, calling his name in broken tones.

 

\----

 

They were still lying tangled together, the chilly air curling around exposed thighs and backs, seeping in at the cracks between them, when Phil's alarm went off again. He leapt in shock, as sudden as a percussion grenade going off, then fell off Clint and scrambled for the phone.

Clint listened to the scrape and bump, idly casting his gaze about into the darkness.

 _zeet zeet zeet zeet zt_ said the phone, and shut off as abruptly as it it had been choked. Phil fell backwards with a snort, the bed shaking with with the impact of his butt. 

"Phil?" Clint asked after a moment, fondness fizzing up from his toes, "did you set a second alarm for when you actually needed to be up?"

"Yes?" Phil replied, clearly unsure whether he ought to admit it. Clint struggled to an elbow, though it didn't help him see through the blackness any better. He wished he could see Phil’s face-- wished Phil could see his, because it might be all the warning he’d get.

 _Can't you stay in bed five more minutes?_ Clint thought-- but five minutes would have turned into five hours, five days, and still wouldn't have been enough. 

Anyway, Phil and his overdeveloped sense of duty would spend the five minutes pretending to be pliant in Clint's arms, while worrying about traffic flow.

"How much time'd you give us?" he asked instead. There was something building up inside him, following the fondness. Possibly a tidal wave, warm and clear and bubbly as a Caribbean sea. He felt the surge start in his chest, was sure it was going to knock him off his feet, send him under, sweep him clean. 

"Forty five minutes," Phil admitted. "I... wanted a little time in there for, um, snuggling. After."

"I love you," Clint sighed helplessly as the wave broke over him.

\----

Phil felt the words hit home like a shot to the solar plexus. Their meaning and the breathless tone of Clint's voice, like they'd slipped out all of their own accord, set his entire body alight.

He couldn't breathe. Needed to….

Needed to say _something_. 

That wasn't the kind of thing you let go by unresponded-to, but he'd had all the wind knocked out of him.

The words were pushing against his teeth, at the backs of his eyes, trying to seep out his fingertips and his skin and--

He needed to see Clint. Maybe... maybe that would help somehow.

The cord to the lamp hadn't moved since he'd been gone; it was absurd how long it took him to find it. How his fingers shook, could barely find the strength to roll the switch downwards.

Light blinded them both, glaring and artificial.

When his eyes were finally willing to open, the orange pinwheels behind his eyelids fading, he found Clint blinking up at him, not a hawk at all but a great, tawny, hairless owl brought out at noon. He looked confused, tousled-- but not at all uncertain.

Phil still couldn't speak, so he did the next best thing-- swooped down to curl his arms under Clint's shoulders and lift him into a kiss. _I knew this would happen_ part of his mind tried to tell him, as he shook with how tightly he was holding Clint. _I knew it! Couldn’t just leave things lie, could you?_ The rest of him, however, found it impossible to feel chastised.

 _It’s too soon. We both know it’s way too soon_ he thought, but muffled it against Clint’s lips. 

Time was so uncertain. How long until he had another close call? Until someone found Clint? Or until yet another sudden upset robbed him of a day back on North Bar and the scent of fall and brine, of time to come back to Clint and see that look on his face again? By the time the _right_ time arrived, they might all be in jail or dead-- and if they weren’t, then they could deal with what they’d said.

More than likely, the kiss was ample proof of Phil's feelings on the matter, but as he pulled away and buried his face in Clint's neck, right under his ear where bearded jaw met scruffy hairline, Phil finally found his voice.

"Love you, too," he whispered, and realized why Clint's own voice had sounded so breathless; those words were too big to allow any oxygen around them. 

Clint reached up and gentled Phil with one big hand against his back, the other curving against his skull. 

"Come on," he said, "if I don't send you home now, I never will. Time to get up."

"Yes," Phil agreed, but he paused to take one last, long breath full of Clint before he rose. "Yes I suppose. But I'll come home on the weekend."

Clint rose with him, naked body gleaming in the light, and Phil took a long moment just to gaze at him, fondness etching the memory into him. 

"Are you coming with?" he asked at last, and Clint nodded.

"Yeah, so I can have Lola here with me. You can meet us at the fundraiser on Friday and I'll take you home." As he was saying it, Clint was already pulling away, leaving one last kiss on Phil’s knuckles, and turning to dig in his dresser drawer for a pair of pants.

"Oh, god, am I going to that?" Phil asked, idly noting that Clint _still_ wasn’t wearing boxers. “I thought that was your job now. I wrangle superheros, you deal with the Shoreline Preservation Society. Or Kate Bishop does. I already went to a stupid Stark party for you. I deeply resent being asked to attend this one the one time I have an excuse not to.” _For instance, I could be attending to you at home._ He took a pair of boxers from Clint’s hands and put them on without paying a lot of attention to much besides the sweep-and-resettle. Halfway through the gesture, he paused, considered going commando himself.

Just to see if Marcus-fucking-Fury noticed.

Clint was pulling on a fisherman’s sweater, and his voice was muffled as he replied.

“You do not,” he said. “And between Kate and Wanda and Doc Halliday and all, Stark’ll have nothing on this one. Hell, they even got an eighties cover band all the way from Loveladies.” His head reappeared, and he was twinkling at Phil. “Eighties. Cover. Band. Phil. Tony only _wishes_ he threw parties like this. VFW. Seven o’clock. You’ll be there by eight. I’ll save you a dance.”

\----

It was only when they were halfway to LBI, a tiny bubble under the dome of stars, Lola's headlamps shining yellow beams out over the dark water, the dockside lights of Gansett Light gleaming at them in welcome, that Phil realized what had happened.

Instead of tabling the talk, the _so we’re in love-- so what next?_ awkwardness, until after things had resolved one way or another, he and Clint seemed to have had the discussion somewhere between the lines as they talked about practical things.

Or not really bothered to have it, either way.

"Home," Clint had called Avengers Tower-- which was oddly comforting, that he still thought of the place and the people there as his own. Still walked its hallways in his memory, still wanted to go back. (Hopefully. Hopefully that was what it meant.) Phil’d seen the Clint-shaped empty spaces left in the kitchen and the quinjet and around the tv in the evenings. 

But: “home,” Clint had called North Bar, too. That... was nearly impossible for Phil to keep in his head. It kept skittering off. 

_Your home, my home._

He looked over at Clint, where the pale light of the instrument panel lit his face from below. It'd returned to its resting scowl, but now and then wonder chased across its features. Mostly when he turned towards Phil.

 _I love you, Clint Barton_. Phil said it in his head again. _I love you and I won’t let you down._

The only important thing at the moment, after all, was to make Avengers Tower safe for Clint to come home again.

They could figure out the rest later.

 

 **Two**

From Long Beach Island to the island of Manhattan, Phil’s mind existed in an odd space, half apart, while he navigated largely by instinct. By the time he got to Newark traffic was starting to congeal into the morning rush, but he noticed that about as much as he’d noticed the rest of the drive, made largely in solitude, the big rigs and the local delivery trucks his companions.

In the dark, thoughts of Clint tangled with thoughts of Holly, ghosts dancing across the windshield, smeared by a light rain and the streaks of high-beams and brake lights. 

Because he’d promised himself he’d set aside the tangled question of _home_ , and Clint’s place therein, until they’d managed the not-insignificant task of clearing Clint’s name, Phil would shake his head and search for something to distract him whenever his mind started to wander that way.

Which would lead to thinking about his last home before North Bar: the neat little apartment in Brooklyn, his and Holly’s. Holly had gone from calling it _our home_ to _our apartment_ , and finally just to _the apartment_ , near the end. But at one point, they’d lived in it together, moving through the days and cooking meals and looking for work and settling down to the tv together in the evenings. 

But that line of thought wasn’t allowable, either, not when he had to be calm and collected for Fury, so Phil’d shake his head _again_ and think of how Clint had distracted him the night before, and then he’d shift in his seat, since it had been a while-- a long while-- since he’d felt quite so aware of the state of things in his jeans. Then he’d think about Clint in his bed and about that _home_ question. 

So, bouncing between the present and the past, Phil got into New York, found parking, and was inside SHIELD and walking into Fury’s office before he’d really snapped awake and alert.

“Morning,” Phil said as he slipped inside the open door, and Fury looked up at him with a glare. The sun was still not quite up, but the dawn behind the windows in the office was starting to turn pink. The window in question was not quite as high up at the kitchen in Avenger’s Tower, but it was an impressive view all the same.

“Nice drive?” Fury asked him, his tone light and inquiring and still managing to convey that Cheese had gotten himself stuck in the middle of a minefield yet again and Marcus was just gonna sit and wait until he got himself out.

“So I saw Holly last night,” Phil said, and plopped down in the visitor’s chair across from Fury. He briefly contemplated putting his feet on the desk, before remembering that he didn’t actually have a death wish.

“You did, did you?” Fury fiddled with something under his desk and his door swung shut. Also, Phil assumed, most of the surveillance in his office went dead. _Aha. Yes, we’ve struck paydirt._ “Was that before or after you decided to go AWOL?”

“AWOL’s a thing for the military, Marcus,” Phil replied, leaning forward, and realizing as he did that his mind was starting to float off into that detached place again, the place where he just let it form the words for him without bothering with analysis. “I just took some comp time.”

“You had us thinking you were kidnapped or dead, Phil,” Fury picked up a mug of coffee and contemplated it, taking a moment to sniff appreciatively. Which meant he’d guessed Phil hadn’t had time to stop at a coffee shop along the way, the bastard.

“Worried you, huh?” He had, Phil knew-- he’d heard it in Fury’s voice on the phone yesterday. Touching as it was (annoying as it was-- he’d spend fifteen years largely the master of his own time, and now all this fuss), Phil was glad he’d had the rest of the day to regain his nerve. He was gonna need it.

“Little bit,” Fury replied, offhand, then his gaze turned sharp. “Are you serious about this job, Coulson? Are you _capable_ of it? Because getting rattled just from seeing an old war buddy kind of suggests the opposite.” The coffee nearly sloshed out of the mug as Fury gesticulated with it.

“I thought he was dead for the last fifteen years, Marcus,” Phil said, “I think I get a pass.”

“Bullshit, you thought I was dead for over seventeen, and you didn’t run off when you saw me.” _Maybe you should have_ hung unspoken in the air between them. 

Phil waited until Fury was sipping again, watching closely as his dark fingers closed over the black mug, let himself remember for a moment how ashen they’d been, laid over his own wrist, back when he thought Marcus Johnson had died.

“True enough. But then, you weren’t my lover.”

He didn’t _spit_ coffee out, nor snort it through his nose nor any other undignified thing, because Nicholas Motherfucking Fury, Director of SHIELD, was in far better control of his own trachea than that.

Fury _did_ choke a little, though. Then he closed his eye, heaved a breath, and put the coffee down, carefully as if it contained nitroglycerin.

“How long?” he asked, and Phil heard the silent clause at the end: _How long did I manage to miss seeing that?_ A cardinal sin for a spy.

“From about ‘95 to when he left to go to Yugoslavia that last time. You just didn’t ask… and we didn’t tell.” Phil answered him quietly. He caught when Fury’s brow unfurrowed just a little, and fought not to smile. _No, you didn’t miss when it happened. It was just part of the lay of the land when you came in._

“That why you left the Army? Someone asked?” 

“That’s why we left the Army,” Phil said, and got a kind of disgusted headshake for his trouble. Not that he’d have expected anything less of Fury-- Marcus-- whomever. Even if Clint hadn’t seemed worried about Fury’s reaction, Phil himself had never known Marcus to bother disapproving of people for anything so petty as the gender of the people they took to bed. 

“You got an honorable discharge,” Fury replied, eyes narrowing. “I did check. Felix never said anything about how he got his. Told me he’d just decided to try and be a civilian, and it wasn’t working for him.”

“We blackmailed our way to an honorable discharge, and tried to play house together... and no, it wasn’t working for us, especially. But Marcus,” Phil leaned forward, catching his eye and drawing it back up until their gaze was level, “that doesn’t mean shit when you find out your lover’s been kidnapped, is probably dead, and when after _months_ of fighting the system, they _finally_ tell you they think they’ve found his bones _in a mass grave._ ”

That got him. Phil could see the hook set, and Fury’s flinch just drove it deeper. 

“That wasn’t SHIELD’s doing, that was Archstone’s fucking cover up,” he said, sounding as bitter as his coffee probably was. He’d always liked it on the battery acid side of things. “We just let them get on with it. Bunch of goddamned amateurs.” 

It wasn’t so different from Marcus Johnson’s grumble, one memorable time in the Hindu Kush. That was why it was so ironic Holly’d gone off to join them-- “maybe I can raise the general level of competence,” he’d said. “Plus the benefits are great.”

“And you recruited Holly then? In Yugoslavia?” Phil asked, trying not to look too invested in the answer. Fury looked like he knew exactly how fake that nonchalance was, but he talked anyway.

“Felix got kidnapped outside of Kosovo-- shouldn’t ever’ve been there, it wasn’t safe for any of us after Orlat. We found him by coincidence. I was leading a retrieval op; he happened to be held by the same guys. Of course I snapped him up-- even at the time he was nearly as good as you; no fucking way I was passing up the opportunity. Kept him dead because it was the safest thing at the time. You,” he glared at Phil, “ _you_ were safe because you showed no signs of ever leaving the East Coast and your little island again. Him I gave a new name, set him up with a probation period. He’s a _damn_ good SHIELD agent, Cheese. He’s saved the world at least twice by my count.”

“I wouldn’t expect any less of him,” Phil replied, fighting not to duck his head against the memories buffeting him. “He was a shitty domestic partner, but he was always a good soldier. I’m not surprised he’s a good agent.” 

“He told me you were, uh, not doing so hot after you left the Army.” There was Fury’s annoying habit again, of speaking right to what you _weren’t_ saying at any given point in time. “He wrong?” The question came out baldly, like Fury didn’t give enough of a fuck about it either way to bother with finesse. Phil met his one-eyed gaze calmly, and just for long enough that he hoped he conveyed _I see right through you, Marcus Johnson_ before he assented with a little shrug of his lips and eyebrows.

“He was right,” Phil said. “Both less and more than he thought, I think. Blaming it on the post-Army readjustment was easier for us both than admitting anything we might have been doing wrong. But I didn’t really like civilian life, either. He went to Archstone-- I… in the end I went to North Bar.”

 _He herded Hawkeyes, I herded chickens_ , Phil did not add.

“Hrmph,” said Fury, a grunt that nevertheless sounded a little relieved on the ends. Phil took that to mean that Fury hadn’t wanted to find out that Felix Hollis had lied to him about Phil’s state, in order to avoid having to work with Phil again. 

Between Clint’s story about Blake and Fury’s reactions, Phil thought he was gaining a fairly clear picture of Agent Blake: hyper-competent, dry as a cheap chardonnay, reliable and allergic to drama. The kind of agent Fury must have most needed at his back. Not so different from Holly, really. He must have gone on as he began, once freed of Phil’s influence, which kept cracking him about the edges, exposing his soft underbelly.

What he needed a picture of now was Felix Blake. Phil gave a last contemplative look at Fury, and thought he’d drawn his fish along far enough, and it was time to start reeling.

“Well,” he said, quietly, and stood, brushing off his jeans. “I’m glad he’s alive, anyway. Starting to wonder if _anyone_ I thought was dead really is. I’ll be really disappointed if I find out Jimmy Hoffa’s been a SHIELD agent all this time.”

Fury snorted and rose, too, looking Phil over critically.

“Sorry you found out this way, Cheese.” 

Phil shrugged.

“Not the first time this has happened to me. I’d better get back to the Avengers before Stark sends out a search party, and I’ve still got to stop by the quartermaster-- my suits are ready. Nick of time, too; last one got soaked yesterday while I was helping Frank with a buoy problem. Captain Rogers is going to be pissed at me, isn’t he?” 

“You brought it on yourself,” Fury said, but not without sympathy. 

“Could be worse.” Phil threw it over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “At least I’ve got a good excuse. Not every day you see a ghost.”

“Phil.” Fury was between him and the door, looming even, suddenly radiating all the danger his eye-patch allowed him. “You won’t be telling them about this.”

“Marcus,” Phil said evenly, keeping himself in place and still by an effort of will certainly no less impressive than Clint’s wade in frigid dawn waters the day before. _Where’s that wetsuit when I need it?_ “Yes, I will. They deserve an explanation of my actions. Unless you’ve got a damn good reason.” Then he let his face relax for a moment, lips opening on an O and eyebrows rising. “Oh. For fuck’s sake, Marcus. What, is Holly classified? Don’t tell me _they_ think he’s dead, too.” 

He tried not to oversell the sarcasm. _Could_ you oversell sarcasm? (“Never,” Clint’s voice said in his head.)

“Okay,” Fury said, and he leaned against the door.

“They _do_ , don’t they?” Phil asked when it became clear he was done talking. “How the hell many dead men do you _have_ in this agency, Director?”

Director Nicholas Fury, that smug bastard, pursed his lips and tilted his head, clearly actually _calculating_. 

“None that are any of your business, Agent Coulson,” he said at last and Phil glared at him.

“ _This_ one’s my business, unless you really want to have to find another Avengers liaison.” Having delivered his threat in what he hoped was an even enough tone-- and he had plenty of damned history staying insouciant under trying conditions, from Orlat to the Purple Loosestrife Eradication Fair incident-- Phil turned, walked back to the chair he’d just vacated, and sat.

Then he crossed his leg, one ankle on the opposite knee, and sat back.

“It’s well above your security level, Agent,” Fury tried.

“You said I’d have need-to-know for _anything_ that concerned the Avengers. You’re telling me that the Avengers don’t get to know that a particular SHIELD agent who’s able to just casually walk the halls over here is alive? I need to know why. Damnit, Marcus, don’t send me in blind.”

Fury said nothing for a while, and Phil just watched him, waiting to see which way he was going to fall. Finally, he came around his desk and sat down, belling his coat out behind him as he did.

“I don’t need to share any of this with you,” he said quietly, and pulled open his drawer. He withdrew a picture and handed it to Phil. Felix stood in the center of it, sharp in a suit, a polite smile on his face. Tony Stark had one arm wrapped around him, was half leaning over him, giving the camera a “hey you” point. He looked three-quarters drunk at the least-- something Phil had never seen him do. Early days yet, he supposed. They were at some sort of party, a crowd milling behind them, and Natasha was part of it-- deliberately turned away from them. 

“Huh,” Phil said, and handed it back.

“Agent Felix Blake.” Fury spaced the elements of the name carefully, laying them down neatly as tiles. “They talk about him much?”

“I vaguely recall the name,” Phil temporized.

“Yeah, well, I suppose it’s a delicate subject.” Fury took the photo back. “Seeing as he was skewered by Loki, during the Battle for New York. And seeing as I used his death to shock Stark and Rogers back into behaving like the motherfucking superheroes I needed them to be.”

He tossed the photograph on his desk, and leaned back. Phil watched it as much as him as Fury told him about Felix, shadowing Tony Stark back when he was-- secretly-- dying, mentoring Clint and Natasha, meeting Thor-- everything Clint had already told him. Fury’s version of events was so close, except that the way he told it Felix Blake had held Hawkeye and the Black Widow in no little awe.

Phil could well understand _that_. It took a bit more for him to get his head around Felix working at all well with Stark, but then, when he _wanted_ to be, Felix’s complete lack of a surprise reflex could be endearing. When Fury finally circled back to Felix’s death on the helicarrier, Phil sat forward a little. Fury looked… like Marcus. 

Like the Marcus he’d seen outside the embassy, again, just a little haunted about the edges, like he’d tucked a specter away beneath his shirt, and it kept trying to wriggle out. 

“That sounds pretty dead,” Phil prompted as he ran down, laying it out as gently as he could. 

“Oh,” Fury stood and turned away, walking to the window with his hands clasped behind his back, for all the world as if he wasn’t trying to run straight away from sympathy. “It was pretty damn dead. For all of about 47 seconds, he was dead. He was so damn dead he nearly died again several times, and it took the better part of a year to get him rehabilitated. I sent him to Tahiti.”

“Nice if you can get it.” Phil didn’t move, just turned his chair a tad so Fury could better see his reflection in the window. Fury’s own was too shadowed for him to catch an expression. “He meant a lot to you.”

“I needed that man alive, Phil. I needed him alive worse than you can believe. And I needed him off the grid.”

“Because you were tracking down Hydra?” 

“Exactly,” Fury turned back to him finally, looking more like the Director of SHIELD again. “And I needed someone I could trust, socked away where no one could find him. Cheese,” he said it almost like a question, as he came back to the desk, watching Phil the whole time. Phil fought down the sensation of a riptide pulling at his toes. “I had no fucking clue about your personal life, and I guess that says younger me was an idiot sometimes. But I think you and I can agree he’s always been damn good in a tight spot-- almost as good as you. There’s no one you’d prefer to have in your back pocket than Felix”

“Oh,” Phil replied, trying not to think about it, “no question.” (Except for Clint Barton, but that was another matter entirely, and it wasn’t like he was trying to _hide_ Clint, he was trying to _un_ hide him. And Skye would make the list, if he was being honest. She was shockingly good. And Doc Halliday, if you needed someone who could bring the world down between coffee break and lunch. And those were just the ones currently stuffed into his back pocket. Taking Felix’s place, so to speak.) 

He brought himself back to the present question with an effort.

“So, what? Now that Hydra’s been rooted out, it’s okay if he comes out to play, but not with the Avengers?”

“Oh, he’s not supposed to be out playing with anyone below a Level 7; Felix and I are gonna have some words soon.” _That_ was entirely Director Fury; Marcus wouldn’t have bothered to be nearly so circumspect. Phil wondered if his name would come up in the discussion at all.

“You didn’t answer the question, Marcus. Why can’t you tell the Avengers now? You can’t-- okay, maybe you _can_ keep it secret forever, but the longer it takes to come out the worse it’s going to destroy trust with them, and you don’t have any trust you can spare right now.”

“Think I don’t know that?” Fury snapped. “My time to come clean was sometime in the rear view mirror. But that ain’t it. Phil, what I’ve done-- what I’ve got him doing isn’t something I necessarily want the Avengers interfering in.”

“What’s that?” Phil asked, carefully ignoring the stutter Fury’d used to cover whatever it was he’d _done_. _What the hell would make_ Marcus _second-guess himself?_

“We keep a List.” Phil heard the capital letter in Fury’s voice, and raised an eyebrow. “Gifted people.”

“Gifted like… telepaths?”

“Bah, no, no confirmed telepaths exist, Phil, don’t believe everything you read. People, honestly, like the Avengers. No… people with talents like the Avengers. Big damn difference between having some hinky shit happen to turn you into a living black hole, and being a damned superhero.” 

Phil was inclined to agree, especially after encounters with Creel and others of his ilk. 

“And some are naughty, and you house them at the Fridge. And others are nice and you--?” he asked. 

“Track ‘em.” It was what Phil’d been expecting, but it didn’t make him any more pleased with the answer. (Then again, what else _do_ you do with someone who can casually shoot fire from their hands?)

“That’s what Felix is doing right now?” Phil turned in his chair, to follow Fury as he paced. The man’s coat was flapping behind him like it was a living extension of him, a dog’s tail or cat’s fur, picking up his mood.

“Among other things. He shouldn’t even have been here-- that’s what happens when you give the guy a jet plane to live out of, I guess. He’s got a team, anyway. Good team. Would have lost a lot more at the Hub if they hadn’t been there backing Agent Hand’s play.” Phil wondered just how big this jet plane was, to house an entire team.

_This is SHIELD, after all. They put aircraft carriers in the air; who knows what a jet plane means to them. Could be the size of a decent motel._

“I saw him talking with a younger blonde woman?”

“Agent Morse, probably. I’m surprised she wasn’t dragging him back to the ‘Bus by his ear. She’s a force of nature. Phil,” said, and Phil knew the start of a dismissal when he heard it.

 _Yes, god, get me out of here before I break into pieces._ He had no idea how he was supposed to face the Avengers after this. _Thank god I never expected to be able to tell them about Felix._ No matter how tempting it was to just lay it out there. Rogers, of all people, would understand. Romanov would just shrug and mutter “SHIELD.” Stark… well, it would certainly _distract_ Stark.

And he probably could use a little of Sam Wilson’s own particular brand of sympathy.

“Yeah,” he said instead. “Not a word. I get it. I’m going to blame you, you know.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Fury told him. As Phil headed for the door, he was intercepted by Fury’s hand on his arm. “Cheese,” he said.

“Marcus,” Phil replied, and looked him over. His entire face seemed drawn in, fixed on Phil, and for an absurd moment Phil was reminded of Lucky-- or a negative image of Lucky-- maybe Lucky anthropomorphized. He only just managed not to say _oh my god, are you trying to apologize?_ and settled instead for “I’ll see you around.”

“No shit,” Fury told him, and sent him packing.

**Three**

“But have you _tried_ this, Nat?” he asked, and his eyes were wide and earnest underneath the brim of his faded black ballcap. 

“No. But if you keep waving it around like that, I might just bite it off,” Natasha replied, and inwardly wondered just how far this _Nat_ thing was going to go. _I should never have let Steve get away with it. It’s turned into an epidemic._ Hell, at this point she suspected Coulson of using it, though not to her face. How long until a headline described the Avengers as "Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Nat, and the Falcon"?

He did cease waving the hoagie in her face, at any rate, and looked down at it. The monstrosity of a sandwich was dripping at the edges with a truly alarming ooze in a nearly neon orange, and bulging with curdled yellow bits. Natasha couldn't think why anyone would want to be within gooing distance of it, and yet bewildered hurt scrawled across his face in broad strokes. Apparently she'd rejected him along with his breakfast.

 _My god, you little asshole, does that actually work on people who aren't Steve?_ , Natasha thought, surprised by the warmth she'd infused it with. 

She settled back against the center pole of the little hut, looking up at the green plastic roof. As she watched, the wind sloughed another shower of yellow maple leaves off it and sent them scattering across the slide to their right. In retrospect, she was not at all surprised she’d found him up here, slumped in a heap of concealing layers of clothing and surrounded by sacks and a styrofoam clamshell, evidently ready to picnic at the very pinnacle of a piece of far-too-modern playground equipment.

“Good sightlines,” she remarked idly, letting him see her sweeping the street and the lot opposite them, where a couple hardy basketball players were playing horse. "And thank you for coming here. I wasn't sure your place was safe." 

He smiled back at her, then handed her a bag, shaking it when she hesitated. 

“Breakfast,” he said. “So you don’t eat mine.” 

Natasha looked at the bag, then at him and the look he was shooting her from under his scruffy forelocks, then at the bag again. She opened it slowly, wondering if she was going to find a sandwich of similar perverseness to his-- if to such sandwiches even existed. There was a cinnamon roll nestled inside the bag. 

“Did you bring this all the way from Gansett?” she asked, and he nodded solemnly. “Surprised it’s still warm.”

“Insulated cooler,” he said. “Wasn’t sure what you’d want. Anyway, call it part of the reconnaissance or something. You okay with a roll?” The hesitance was back, and he rubbed his neck with his gloved hand. 

“Sure.” Natasha tried to inject reassurance into her tone without falling over the edge into patronizing. It was a very, very thin edge, and she’d cut herself on it more than once when it other people had failed to wield their sympathy deftly enough. If it had been that bad for her, it could only be worse for him. Still.

She eyed his styrofoam clamshell, open on his lap, with interest. There were things lurking in there beyond the yellow submarine sandwich. Natasha flicked her gaze up to meet his, holding it until it became a challenge, then reached slowly over and stole a home fry.

“Hey!” He protested, but made no move to slap her hand as she retreated, watching carefully as she folded the fry into her mouth. “That’s mine!”

Oh. _That_ was why he’d brought food the two and a half hours from Long Beach Island. She fought against letting her eyes flutter closed as the full effect of the home fry hit her. Clint… Clint would have _loved_ this place. Even the absurd sandwich would have been right up his alley.

“Just trying to help. You eat all that, you’ll die of carb overload,” Natasha said.

“Happily though,” he replied. She felt more than saw his pause after he said it, and waited to see what he would do. He looked at the sandwich, then up at her again. “Um… wanna try?” 

It seemed like a better idea than letting him see what was on her face at the moment, despite the sheen of oil on the sauce, so Natasha leaned forward, swallowed hard, and bit. 

One extremely _interesting_ bite later, she looked up, eyes watering.

“What the hell was that?” she asked, and was rewarded with a snort of laughter. 

“A specialty of the Outrageous Egg, lady,” he told her. “Hoagie stuffed with an omelette. Buffalo chicken omelet, t' be precise.” And then he side-eyed his own damn sandwich, turning it over in his hands. “Do I wanna know what makes it buffalo in nature?” 

“Depends,” Natasha replied, “do I wanna know why you thought that needed a pancake on the side?”

“Because,” he said, and there was a wild gleam in his eye, “pancake!”

“I’m telling Sam to change the wifi password, James,” she told him, retreating into snark and locking herself up tight. If she didn’t tear up over how much James reminded her of Clint in that moment-- _Is it something with snipers? Or just fragile smartalecs in recovery from mind control?_ \-- she was going to tear up over his pride in a simple meme. 

Possibly because, unlike all the other aspects of the modern world that he was familiar with, memes were largely frivolous. Unnecessary. No possible soldierly purpose. 

The Black Widow did _not_ tear up over scruffy snipers or sodden sandwiches. She did not.

Time to get on with it, now that the banter had settled him. James had so little time until Sam came back from his morning meeting with Steve at Avengers Tower, and though Sam was hardly his jailer, neither would he fail to notice his reclusive roommate’s comings and goings. And Natasha herself would be missed soon from her normal non-routine.

“Besides a good breakfast place,” she replied, and rolled up his pancake with her fingers, “what did you discover?” 

The pancake had been doused in syrup some time in the past, and soaked it up like a sponge. It was gooey, overly sweet, buttery-- and she was so hungry she fought not to down it in two bites. A single cinnamon roll. How _sweet_ of him.

“First of all,” James said, waving his buffalomeletwich at her, rather dangerously given the goo, “it’s a _great_ breakfast place, and secondly, Coulson’s apparently there a lot. And his cousin. So it’s also a _useful_ breakfast place.”

“I did not send you to New Jersey to find out where Coulson breakfasts, James,” Natasha snapped. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t really want Steve mad at me. I'm not risking that for an eggwich."

“Eh, yeah, that puppy eye thing he does,” James said, and laughed sadly to himself. “I get it all the time anyway, and I’m not half so tough as you. So suck it up, buttercup. It’s survivable.”

“James,” she warned him, and he smiled around another bite of eggy goo. (He was smiling more freely than she was used to. Steve's puppy dog eyes of reproach aside, she wished he could see this.)

“Right. Report. Yes’m. So besides having a cousin with a fondness for heart-attack food, Coulson’s pretty damn near a saint in LBI. I hear that the weeping and gnashing of teeth was widespread, at least ‘fore the local ladies who lunch started getting his cousin to take his place. Anyway, no one says a bad word about the guy, Nat. But--” And he took another bite.

“ _But_?” Natasha prompted, emphasizing her annoyance with a fry abduction.

“But,” James swallowed, watching the fry as it went, “you’re not wrong. The place is full of spooks. Y’d expect SHIELD, and SHIELD is there. Saw a tall black guy coming and going, all big pearly smile.”

“Ah, Agent Triplett. He was our last temporary liaison, before Coulson came back this morning.”

“Morning, huh? Came back from where? SHIELD?” The orange sauce was dribbling down James’s chin now, and Natasha averted her eyes.

“North Bar, apparently. Clearly he didn’t stop at your breakfast place. No, I am told he walked into SHIELD at seven this morning, in his jeans.”

“Scandalous,” James said, and Natasha shook her head and laughed.

“It is when you have a meeting with Director Fury. What was said, I do not know. He came out an hour later, and came back to the Tower just in time for Stark to pretend to faint at the sight.” 

Not a bad sight, either, all things considered-- Natasha had been there, just preparing to leave for Harlem and her rendezvous with James Barnes. Coulson had walked into the common room with a suit bag slung over his shoulder, a dangerous mildness to his gaze, and a surprisingly firm behind underneath his denim. Tony had snarked, which was nearly reflexive with him when startled or relieved or hurt, let alone all three. Steve had joined them at that point, turning a slightly hurt look on their liaison, along with an “it’s good to see you back, Agent Coulson. You were missed.” By which he meant _Victoria Hand nearly killed us and I nearly threw her out a window._

“You had coverage,” Phil told him, though not unkindly, “and I needed a chance to breathe fresh air.” Then he looked them all over-- Bruce had come out of the woodwork somewhere to give a sympathetic sort of snort-- and nodded briskly. “Now, as I’m supposed to be on duty in approximately fifteen minutes, I’m going to go suit up. The suits are SHIELD-issue, so please run if you hear me screaming." 

She didn’t bother to tell James any of that-- not when time was so short. Not… not when she wasn’t yet sure what she trusted him with, of her mind and her suspicions. (If the vague sense of unease that had been growing on her rose to the dignity of “suspicion,” anyway.)

“Well,” James was saying, and she rolled the rest of the pancake into her mouth and chewed as she listened to him, “if you’re still looking for reasons to be suspicious-- apart from jeans, I mean-- there’s this: not only wasn’t your Agent Triplett the only SHIELD guy there, the other one was sneaking like he meant it. Black ballcap, black clothes-- whole nine yards.” Natasha carefully did not glance at James’s black hoodie or dark jeans. “Jawbone that could cut marble,” he continued. “Asking around about North Bar, and about the girl who works out there sometimes. Now, two SHIELD agents, that might not be anything.”

Natasha shrugged. This was indeed so. Fury was not one to take chances.

“But. The whole town-- Gansett, I mean-- acted so weird about it. Just froze up around him-- like they were expecting it. Like they all had something to hide.”

“To hide about what, though?” Natasha leaned forward, her thoughts of another frynapping attempt forgotten. “Something about North Bar? Coulson?” 

James shrugged-- and turned the open clamshell away from her. 

“Hard to tell. Not without gettin’ clammed up on myself. So I just listened. I don’t think SHIELD was the only one asking. IDed at least one kinda half-assed private guy that I’d swear I saw on Quinn’s yacht. Bet there were more. Nat, the place is settling down now, but when I got there it was _crawling_ with watchers. And I don’t think any one of us sorry SOBs knew what the hell we were looking _for_.”

“Damnit,” Natasha swore, and picked up her cinnamon roll, turning it over in her hands. James watched her benignly, then his eyes flickered out behind her, and she heard the shouts of children in the distance. “It’s not enough. There’s something there, I’m certain.”

“Sure there is,” he agreed, “but if you go, you’re as likely to stir up a hornet’s nest and get yourself noticed by the other spooks. You're high-profile now. Why else’d you send a… guy like me?” 

Natasha stole another fry, rather than answer that. Had she managed to become a functional human so soon, when it was her finding her way back into her own head, trying to redeem herself? It seemed like he was moving at lightning speed sometimes; fast enough, indeed, that this conversation was even possible. That, when she’d needed someone to climb onto Ian Quinn’s yacht and search while Quinn had been distracted with Natasha’s knees, it had been James she turned to. There'd been little choice-- she needed someone that SHIELD wouldn't expect. Had James not already been chafing under the bubble wrap Steve had encased him in, however, she wouldn't have risked it at all.

He’d surprised them both with how well he’d navigated those shoal waters. Sneaking and spying were more or less second nature, but all the thousand and one anxieties were unknowns: logistical complexities like travel from Harlem to the marina, distracting Sam, finding tac gear. They’d both been nervous, with so much riding on it, but he'd come through unscathed, hull intact, and Quinn none the wiser.

And now Long Beach Island. She was beginning to think he’d regarded it as a _vacation._

A dangerous vacation, but still. 

“I can take care of myself,” she said quietly, and he snorted.

“I know. But what about the people there?”

And that-- that was the question, indeed.

 

**Four**

“Well, how was that?” America asked, panting, and stepped back far enough to be able to look Kate in the eye.

“Amazing. Just… amazing. About the only reason the day wasn’t an entire waste,” Kate told her, and knocked their foreheads together before stepping out of the circle of her arms and walking on shaking legs to her vanity to start combing her hair out. “We’ve _got_ to try that again.” 

She sat down on the little white scrollwork chair in front of the fake-baroque vanity; a leftover from her pre-teen princess phase, and picked up her comb, blinking at her fingers when she realized they were shaking. There weren’t many moments in her life where she could point to the exact thing that had tipped her world upside down. But she’d just had one, she knew.

Kate was tempted to suggest they have another round, right there, right that moment, but it was close to mid-afternoon. Emily had to be awake and rooting around downstairs. It’d be pushing their luck too far, to expect her not to notice. 

Still.

America standing there, silhouetted in the glass door to her balcony, long gauze curtains on either side of her making her seem like Romeo or Zorro or Rapunzel or whoever the fuck else climbed balconies? Was not good for Kate’s self-control. Especially not with her hair all wild and color high in her cheeks. 

“Oh, yeah?” America said, and came forward again to run a finger down Kate’s cheek. She took the comb from Kate’s hand and, looking over her shoulder in the mirror, began to run it through Kate’s hair, one hand stroking behind it, smoothing and gentling Kate as she talked. “We could try some different holds next time.”

“Mmmm,” Kate said, and met her eyes through their reflections. “Like a princess carry?” 

As it turned out, America helpless with laughter was really shockingly sexy. Of course, everything _about_ America was sexy, and the fact that she could _actually fucking fly_ was certainly high up there on the list.

 _Why the hell didn’t I ask to come with before now? Holy fuck! What I’ve been missing!_ The print of America’s hand was still tender around her ribs, where America’d clutched her as they flew back from Atlantic City, skimming several yards above the waves. 

It’d been the best way to get off the island without being noticed-- and it was a _lot_ faster than motorboat. Shockingly fast. Like being strapped to a rollercoaster going downhill fast except so much safer, and Kate finally thought she knew why stock car racers did what they did. No fucking better feeling than to be at the mercy of something so powerful, racing you so fast around bends and up and down, your heart swooping out of your chest and bottoming out between your thighs. 

Her hair was hopeless, she knew, and a few late bugs had maybe gotten up her nostril, but it couldn’t dampen her joy. If they did this a lot, she’d just have to invest in a motorcycle helmet.

Because god _damn_ , that had been even better than sex.

Not… that Kate knew what sex with America was like yet. She looked up at America again, and realized America’s eyes had dipped past hers, and America _probably_ didn’t have laser vision, but it was hard to tell, the way she was staring at Kate’s chest.

 _Oh, god, I’m nipping up again, aren’t I?_ Well, it’d been _really_ cold, in Kate’s defense. And anyway… if America couldn’t stare, who could?

 _Huh. Wonder if we can have sex_ while _flying. How would that even work for two girl-- goddamnit, concentrate, Katherine Bishop!_

“You gonna tell Skye it was another wash?” Kate asked, instead of following that line of thought any further. It was astounding how many of her thoughts were punctuated by America, these days. Something in that first kiss had clearly been a trigger, like the first puff of a cigarette for some poor kids, like the first draw of a bow had been for her. She was gone, hopelessly addicted to America’s lips.

“Yeah,” America told her, and kissed her softly on the head, setting aside the comb. “I’ll tell her at work tonight. But at least we got something. That’s where Quinn’s yacht’s supposed to be. Only place big enough for it to dock, right?”

“And it wasn’t there,” Kate nodded, and turned around. “Yeah, good point. So we know what we already thought we knew.” Hell, they’d been in decent viewing range of the entire bay near Atlantic City, for over a half hour, flitting around and dropping to new hiding places, before they’d gone into town to do some snooping.

The yacht hadn’t been in _sight_. Wherever it was, it was sending out a fake transponder signal. Skye had a few theories, and was trying to sort through them. It had involved sending America or Kate-- or America and Kate-- off on recon missions across the whole of the Jersey shore, the last few days. After being confined to two little islands for over a month, the freedom was almost scary.

It was also very precarious.

Kate knew she was stretching it, this weird detente with Cousin Emily, where Emily pretended not to notice Kate’s comings and goings and Kate pretended she was doing neither. But the claustrophobic feeling that had temporarily fled when America’d brought her back her bow, when she’d met Hawkeye, was starting to prickle back whenever she stayed at home too long.

_I suppose America could distract me other ways, when this is done. If we’re quiet, no reason she can’t come up here more often and-- oh my god, Kate, you lech. You haven’t even gotten below the waist yet, where the hell is your head?_

“Kate?” America asked, worried now, coming over to her and grabbing her hands. “You okay, chica?”

“I bet you give great head,” Kate said, following her previous line of thought, and then her words caught up with her, and all her senses were drowned out by the buzz of blood as it _raced_ into her cheeks and up her ears. There was a ringing in the distance-- she couldn’t tell if that was a sudden case of lust-related tinnitus or not.

“Wanna find out?” America said, looking, well, _delighted._ There was no other word for it. Her entire face lit up, and Kate didn’t think the blush was ever gonna go down, even if the reason for it had changed a little. 

“ _God_ yes,” Kate breathed out fervently, even while her heart stopped. “Now?” Because if it was _now_ , while Kate’s dander (ahem) was up, she wouldn’t have time to be scared. Or second-guess. And hopefully it was just a matter of holding on to America’s… um… holding on while America did…. “Damnit, my door doesn’t lock,” she wailed as realization hit her.

Cousin Emily had to be smarter than to come in without knocking, right? Right? 

“How ‘bout tonight, chica?” America asked her, grinning. “I’ll pick you up before the dance? We can do a whole after prom thing? You can come with me and lose your virginity.”

“Oh my god, it’s so not a prom, even the girls’ll be in jeans, and I am _not_ a virgin, you jerk,” Kate groaned, remembering. 

VFW hall. Dance. Fundraiser. Clint and Skye were gonna be there. Wanda Jackson expected her to do... do... something during the course of the night. Something involving money or MCing or… oh, god, not MCing, she had to be wrong about that. Right? Kate’s mind flitted from one disaster scenario to another. Phil Coulson was gonna meet them there. She was going to have to figure out how to look him in the eye, after everything she’d called him the last time she’d seen him in person.

 _I’m gonna_ deserve _any sex that comes afterwards,_ she thought.

“Kate! Kate! Katherine _Bish_ op!” Cousin Emily’s voice sounded almost stupidly like it belonged in a Disney movie, like, to one of the evil stepsisters. It was nasal and grating even while it was sing-song.

“Oh holy hell,” Kate muttered, hearing Emily pounding up the stairs. She grabbed America by the arm and shoved her towards the window.

America was laughing on her way out the door to the balcony, and she gave Kate one last kiss and a muttered “seven” as she left, climbing over the white-enamelled steel and leaping out into a swan dive, before shooting back upwards.

It was stupidly hot. In case Kate hadn’t mentioned that yet.

“Kate!” Emily’s voice came from the landing.

Kate whirled and slammed the french door shut, just in time for Emily to blow open the interior door to her room and come through, one hand clutched to her chest.

It was often hard for Kate to remember that Emily was only about ten years older than her-- she seemed to have kind of settled into a finely-sculpted mid-thirties. _She’ll probably stay that way for the next thirty years, too._ Now she was heaving, and the way it ruched the chiffon scarf wrapped around her throat reminded Kate forcibly of Cousin Emily the chicken, so named by America one day. Clint had snorted but allowed it, asking America if it was really fair to the chicken to get a name just because America was tired of getting cock-blocked. 

Kate had wanted to crawl under the porch, curl up, and die. America’d just snorted and asked if it was it cock-blocking if it was two girls.

“What’s up?” Kate asked as Emily paced, flapping her hands just a little. She felt the beginnings of a chill start up her spine. Emily didn’t like _any_ exercise, and those stairs were exercise enough, but this over-dramatic panting was practically an aerobics workout. _What the hell is wrong?_

“Your… your father called,” Emily said.

Kate blanched.

Nothing good _ever_ came of that sentence.

Like, in the history of her life, _your father called_ had never once been followed by something remotely fun. It always seemed to lead back to her being jerked away from things she loved, or at the very least reminded she was underperforming and the lacrosse coach couldn’t understand why she didn’t apply herself.

“Okay?” she said, cautiously.

“He’s… someone told him… Kate… have you been… I thought it was the girl but… have you been over on that island?”

“Which one?” Kate asked, and she walked over to Emily, and put a hand under her elbow, guiding her to sit on the bed. Emily collapsed heavily, with a rustle of silk from her pants, sinking into the overstuffed lavender duvet.

“That little one, the one the hermit used to live on until he went to New York. Your father… he said you’d been going there? _Shooting_?” 

She said it with such distaste, too, like Kate’d been doing lines of cocaine instead of practicing archery. (Come to think of it… it was possible Emily’d know what to do with a simple drug problem. Kate’s love affair with her own bow, and the restlessness that had gotten them both into this mess, confounded her.)

“Have I?” Kate asked, playing for time, and wandering off to her bedside table to try and find her water bottle. “Who told him that?” She ducked down to search under the bedskirt.

“He didn’t say,” Emily told her, and the bed moved. She felt rather than saw Emily peek over the edge, as she was half-buried under the bedframe, patting her hand around, in case the bottle had somehow rolled far beneath it. (It certainly wasn’t just to avoid Emily’s gaze-- of course not!) “But it was someone he met in New York. Is it _true_? Kate, the man there now, that Frank Barney? He isn’t exactly… he isn’t exactly respectable. I mean, the gossip says… well. The gossip says a lot of things. But he’s not someone your father’d approve of-- and he’s way too old for you!”

Kate snorted at the thought of Clint _ever_ being respectable. _You have no fucking idea_. Then she snorted again, because why the hell did everyone think she had a crush on him? (Amazing biceps aside.)

“And that’s why I’ve taken America out there with me. To preserve my innocence,” Kate snarked, sitting up with the water bottle in hand. It had gotten wedged between the case for her hand weights and the underbed storage box of shoes. Emily boggled at her.

“Kate my _god_ , why did you have to do this? He had _two conditions!_ Don’t make a scene and don’t use your bow. Why? What the hell is so important that you had to-- Kate. Kate.” Emily pulled the water bottle out of her hand, and grabbed them both instead.

She was shaking now, and Kate wondered just what her father had said to her. Just what conditions he’d put on Emily.

“I _kept_ my nose clean, Em,” she said instead. “Okay. I mean, except for the punching. Mostly clean. But come on! It’s so fucking boring, and who the hell was going to know?”

Seriously! Who the hell would tell her father-- _why_ would they tell her father? She’d managed to make nice with Wanda, since apparently a thorough knowledge of parliamentary procedure and a willingness to wield it in the face of foundation ladies was enough to forgive any sin. Who else could she have offended so badly that they’d tattle on her?

“Well he did! I don’t know how, but now he’s coming down here to make sure you’re not getting into trouble and I can keep track of you and we both _know_ I can’t, come _on_ , Katherine! You don’t want to go to Sweetbriar, and I don’t really want to have to find a lease, I’ve got subleasers, it would be such a pain and--”

_And it would mean I can’t help Hawkeye. It would mean I can’t see America-- no, it would mean she’d try to sneak onto the grounds and I’d get in even more trouble. Fuck. Fuck!_

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe he’d just bring her back to New York.

Where he could keep an eye on her and have the security cameras checked and force her to go to events with him, and altogether make sure she never saw Billy and Teddy and the others again anyway. Her Dad was mostly notable for his absence, but once you got him pissed off enough-- once you started threatening whatever he saw as his interests-- you were under the microscope.

Kate’d been there.

She never wanted to go back.

“Emily.” Kate pulled free and put her hands on Emily’s knees, squeezing. “I’m sorry.” _Sorry I got caught_ hung in the air between them, well understood. “I’ll stay low-key. What did he want you to do for now? Lock me in my tower?”

 _Fat lot of good that would do you when my girlfriend can fly. And I’ve got friends who climb buildings and hack any security system out there. And I might need it. Huh-- wonder if Coulson would mind_ two _fugitive archers on his island._

“No… he. Well, yes? Maybe? I have to be with you whenever you leave the grounds,” Emily said. “Or else he… he said he’d tell us what ‘or else’ was when he got here.”

Well, that gave them a reprieve, at least for the night. No way her Dad would be able to get away till at least Sunday. A little more than a day to plan her strategy, talk to America and Skye and Clint, figure out how to keep herself on the island.

“Okay, well, so for now we do what we’re doing tonight anyway. You’ll meet me at the VFW fundraiser, I won’t punch anyone, we’ll both be perfectly respectable, and we’ll go from there, okay?” Kate tried to get herself to believe it, that just playing nice for a night or two would be enough to stave off the axe.

“Okay, okay.” Emily’d mostly calmed down, de-ruffling slowly, and Kate realized with a shock she’d even been treating her cousin like a chicken. _Too much time spent hanging around on North Bar for sure._

The thought hit Kate as she was packing Emily back out the door, and it hit with the oomph of a dozen Americas punching. 

There was only one person she _knew_ had been talking to Dad, who’d know she’d been shooting on North Bar.

Phil Coulson. _He talked to Dad at that Stark fundraiser a few weeks back. Maybe they’ve been in touch since then? But why the hell would he say anything about it?_ Maybe he didn’t know he had? But still… what the hell game was he playing? 

Even if he still held a grudge against her, he had to know she was helping him and Clint. And she couldn’t imagine anyone betraying Clint, just to get petty revenge on her. (Except that, if Skye and Clint were right about what had happened to him-- someone had. Betrayed Clint. Not wanted petty revenge. She thought.)

_Well, he’ll be at the fundraiser tonight. I guess… I guess I’ll just have to find out._

Confronting Phil Coulson. What a great start to an evening.

 _Well, I’ve done it once._ And it had worked out _so well_ too, her inner self snarked, and her inner self was kind of a bitch sometimes, and could definitely shut up right now.

**Five**

Late autumn evenings out on the dunes just didn't have the romance of summer nights under the stars. The waves muttered the same mutter as they crawled up the beach, the dune grass's whisper hadn't changed a bit, and if anything the air was more hushed, sound more muted now that the vacationers had gone home. But the chill in the air snaked up Kate's legs and flicked up under her skirt. The shrug that had seemed so cosmopolitan in New York was merely flimsy here, and the wind blew through it and hit her nipples like it was trying to replicate America's hands.

 _Those_ now, _those_ were warm enough-- perfect, really, hot and calloused and agile. One cupped Kate firmly, kneading, thumb flicking over to soothe her nipple. It didn't stay there long, moving in the thin space between shirt and bare flesh, warming where it went, so that Kate was a patchwork of goosebumps from cold and from arousal.

America's _other_ hand was still, pressed heavily into the hard curve of Kate's pelvis, Kate's thong tangled between her fingers, elastic cutting a dull line of discomfort around the flesh of her hip and the dip of her ass. The hands held Kate in place, semi-upright, braced against the rough wood of the boat shed. Out here it was just them and the stars-- the Trashcan was occluded behind the dunes and the shed roof. 

But none of that mattered a damn next to what America was doing under her skirt, opening new dimensions with a punch of her tongue.

Kate closed her eyes and bit her lip, trying to stay upright as desire crashed over her to the rhythm of the beach. America's breath was moist and hot on her inner thighs, and all Kate's body heat, all her blood, concentrated there, where with tongues and lips and-- teeth? oh holy shit, yes!-- America was slowly turning Kate into an invertebrate. 

It had never... _ever_... _Oh_ this _is what scares the Defense of Marriage types so badly. Don't think... don't think I'm ever gonna bother with a _guy's_ mouth down there again. Oh, shit,_

Kate paused her restless clinging at America's curls for half a moment.

 _Does this make me not straight after all--_ "AH! God! America!"

How someone with her face buried under Kate's skirt could tell that Kate had been thinking too hard, she wasn't sure, but maybe America was good at reading her mood through her clit. Whatever, if she kept doing that... that _thing_ with her tongue, Kate didn't care if she was open as a kid's first reader. She wasn't gonna be thinking coherent thoughts anyway.

America's hum was a little muffled, buzzing in a way that made Kate's thighs twitch reflexively, and tore another low groan out of her.

_Yeah, picking up the pace? Not gonna regret that decision any time soon._

With a long, wet flick of tongue, America pulled back, and cold air flooded where she'd been mouthing Kate, painful and arousing at once, until it got up-- up! far enough to make her shudder.

"Y'okay up there, querida?" America asked peeking out from under Kate's skirt. "Gonna be able to stay upright?"

"I can handle it," Kate panted at her, knowing it was the worst kind of bravado. "I can handle anything you can dish out." America's lips and nose-- nose!-- were wet, gleaming in the moonlight, as she grinned.

"Sure you can, chica," she said, " _Sure_ you can." There had never been anything half so sexy in this universe, Kate thought, as America on her knees and slick with Kate, daring her with that damned smirk. It sent an ache straight through her-- well, mostly through the parts America was utterly _failing_ to pay attention to at the moment. 

"You damn tease, get back down there, I thought you were supposed to be showing me how it's do-uh- _one!_ " Kate's attempt at sarcasm was ruined at the end as America's tongue unerringly found its way back down and _twirled._

 _I will_ never _remember how to do this,_ Kate thought, a tiny tendril of despair shooting through the arousal. Then America nestled in and all conscious thought disappeared.

Disappeared so far she didn't hear the footsteps crunching over the dune until a voice shattered her concentration.

"Oh, my god, could you two be any more cliched?"

\----

One of these days, one of these days haste was gonna be Skye's undoing. The thought sparked in her brain, ran like a faint counterpoint to the main two reactions her brain was wrestling with.

Reaction number one wasn't very advanced-- she hadn't gotten far beyond "Get Kate and America! Now!" in her plan of action, and since neither of them were answering texts quickly enough (within ninety seconds, basically), she'd hotfooted it down to the Trashcan, where America was gonna meet Kate before they went to the VFW together. They hadn't been _at_ the house, but since Skye'd kinda been tracing their phones ever since they joined Team North Bar (hey-- you never know when someone's gonna get kidnapped), that presented only momentary difficulties. 

It had just never occurred to her-- because she was moving too fast to think, again-- _why_ they'd be out behind the boat shed.

So reaction number two was even less advanced, in that it was a mostly incoherent combination of _oh shit_ , formless embarrassment, and _humina!_

Look-- Skye had eyes, okay? And she knew sexy women when she saw them on a beach, one buried in the other's skirt and trying to re-enact Squeeze songs. 

_If I start humming "Pulling Mussels for Michelle," I suspect I'll get punched into another dimension. Pity that. Where was I? Oh. yes. Panicking._

"Skye, what the fuck?" Kate snapped, her voice thick with either shock or shame. "Learn to knock!"

"No fucking time, sorry-- the dance. I need you there _now_." Skye met her eyes-- anything was better than looking down at the moment. Or pointing out the complete and utter lack of doors to knock on.

"We were just coming," America said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. 

"Not fast enough!" Skye told her, then smacked herself on the forehead. 

"What's wrong?" Kate pushed away from the wall and attempted to tug her skirt straight. America was still sitting half-under it, so the maneuver didn't go as precisely planned.

"Everything," Skye told her, trying to keep her voice calm despite the way every muscle in her body was telling her to grab the girls and run. "Clint's about to be in trouble, and the boss may be walking into a trap. If we don't go now? We're all screwed."

\----

To be continued....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time: The dance, the visitor, and the morning after. Posts Sunday, Nov. 22.
> 
> All right, I'd like it noted for the record that this chapter went up at 11:59 my time. Eleven. Fifty. Nine. As beta Faeleverte said, "I know we joke about “last minute” but THIS was a bit... literal." 
> 
> No tumblr bonus tonight, but there'll be teasers over the next two weeks.


	18. Something In the Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody-- but everybody-- shows up for the annual Preservation Society fundraiser. Welcome to a Very Special Holiday Episode of Washed Ashore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory Chicken note: A chicken riot would have been far more interesting.

**One**

“Okay, so is beef the one that starts with the red flag with the bite, or is it the one with the blue square thingy?” 

It was the fifth time that Skye’d asked the question, with increasing levels of urgency. The first four times, Tom had grunted something unintelligible from the back room. Des Tudeski leaned against the counter and sighed so heavily she was afraid his belly was going to slide off him-- it looked on the verge of it most days, anyway. 

They both squinted at the stacks of boxes in the glass-fronted freezer.

“I suppose it really matters?” 

Des looked her in the eye for a long moment, then said flatly:

“I don’t suppose _I_ care. My husband? That is a different ball of wax. Isn’t there some kind of code you could just look up? I have to be at the VFW in two hours to set up. Frank was supposed to help, but he said something came up. He sounded distracted. A chicken riot maybe?”

All day Skye’d been getting the same story from customers. _Can’t stay, Wanda’s asked me to get more bunting. Can I get that to go? I’m due at the hall in twenty with the chairs. Can I borrow Tom’s rolly thing for kegs? I’m not throwing out my back for the kind of piss I’m supposed to load in for the dance._ She hadn’t expected the fundraiser to be half as big a deal as it was.

Apparently, when Gansett Light shed its tourist season jazz-bar spangles and high-heeled rock club boots, it was the kind of town where everyone, regardless of generation, really truly did go down to the old army-surplus quonset hut that still, decades after the war that had spawned its peculiar architecture then abandoned it when the need was gone, passed for a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. There they would ritually drink cheap beer and dance too close and too sweaty to a local cover band made up of daytime plumbers and teachers and tech writers. Skye had little to no experience with that kind of community event, where everyone grumbled but everyone went and the stories resulting from it lasted at least until Christmas.

They were also the kind of community that apparently thought everyone's business was their own. Skye'd been asked to explain Clint's sudden absence from the preparations by three different people already. She'd have snapped that he was a grown man and she wasn't his secretary, except that Des was clearly agitated, sweating and nervous. Why make it worse? Skye looked at the pot pie options again.

Red flag, red and blue, red and blue, red diamond; or blue square, red and yellow, red and yellow _cross_ \-- oh. 

_Some pattern recognition genius you are, Skye, jeez._

“Chicken riot sounds more exciting,” she said, handing Des two of the Red Flag boxes. “He's behind getting the cottage winterized 'cause some equipment came late. And Phil'll be home tonight." It was close enough to the truth anyway, and Des didn't need to know what equipment or whyfor. "I'll make Frank buy you a beer at the dance. Say hi to Lennie for me. Tell him I’ll be there at six for sound check.”

“Sure,” Des told her, already halfway out the door with the boxes under one down-coat-clad arm. “But he won’t be. Six thirty; all right?”

Skye saw him out the door, and had just turned to leave the counter when a voice stopped her.

“What’s in the boxes?” 

“Pot pies,” Skye said, and turned. A youngish woman in a leather jacket Skye'd have killed for was leaning over the counter, staring at the freezer behind it. “Want to see the options?”

“No,” said the woman, pointing at a pile labeled with a red, white, and blue striped flag first. “That's the one I want.” Skye pulled it out and set it on the counter next to her. The woman examined the box for a moment, one crimson fingernail running over the printed flags. “Time for me to settle up?”

“Sure,” Skye smiled, while inwardly sighing. Last customer, thank everything. Tom was closing early since he had a massive catering order to trundle over. She’d hoped to get a few hours in on her laptop, completing the project she'd promised Clint, before she had to go play sound tech for the dance.

_At least it gives me something useful to do, instead of chasing phantom ships over the radar. But man I hope we never need to use it._

“Busy day?” the woman asked, as Skye rung up her check. Skye shrugged and mentioned the dance, babbling a bit as she waited for the credit card to go through, just for the sake of it. Big dance. Everyone’ll be there. Whole island.

“Oh, yeah? Nothing to do in town tonight then?”

“Not if you don’t like eighties music, cheap beer, and really good food. ‘S why we’re closing early,” Skye waved an idle hand. 

The woman had been sitting in one of the booths all afternoon, fitfully tapping at a tablet and picking at a large order of fries. Skye’d eyed her when she first came in, still mindful of Phil’s warning during his unexpected visit earlier in the week.

_I wasn’t discreet when I came here; it’s going to make people curious. SHIELD, Avengers, Quinn’s people, anyone else watching us. Watch out._

But the woman hadn’t looked remotely interested, not even when Wanda had come in complaining about the sheer numbers of strangers who’d descended on North Bar recently and that the _least_ that they could do was come to the dance and spend some money on a good cause, if they _were_ going to skulk around anyway. (“Present company excepted, of course, Skye. You’re practically an islander now.”)

Nor when the chief of the volunteer fire brigade and his cronies had sat down at the big center table for lunch and expounded at length about how lucky the island was to have Frank Barney around-- the man was a freakin’ workhorse, and real polite, and clearly knew how to lead a squad, too, if necessary. And when Coulson got tired of playing spy games up in New York, maybe he could push _him_ to start managing a shift. 

Which was the kind of thing that, if _she’d_ been snooping on Phil, would have had her scootching closer, not glaring out of the corner of her eye and pointedly shifting further into the booth’s pleather interior. 

_Don’t be an idiot, Skye. Just because you had ulterior motives when you came here… and Kate did… and so did America… doesn’t mean everyone who comes to LBI does. Not everyone’s a spy._

“You going?” the woman asked, but she was kinda glancing at her nails, looking for chips, so Skye didn’t figure she was getting asked out.

“Yeah,” Skye said, and tore the tape off the register. “Sign here. And here’s your copy. You got a place to keep that pot pie, or you want us to keep it for you?”

“No,” the woman poked at the box again, “it won’t thaw on the drive back. Thank you!”

“Thank _you_ ,” Skye said, and saw her out the door. The minute she left, Skye flung down her apron and her pad and hoisted herself onto the open counter of the order window that led to the kitchen. “Tom!” she called. “I’m out! See you tonight!”

Tom shouted something complex, but Skye was already out the door and booking it, her head already filled with code.

Which partially explained, she would later defend herself, why she didn’t figure it out earlier. If she had been just the littlest bit more suspicious, and just done an image search on google or something-- and google was all it would have taken-- she might have been able to warn Clint before he left the island.

Things might have gone differently, then. Although-- Clint being Clint and still having the heart of a circus performer, all dramatics, it might have been good that he didn’t have time to prepare.

As it was, she didn’t see the woman again until she was already at the VFW hall, fingers flicking over a sound board as Lennie tried to teach her the basic principals in the five minutes allotted for sound check. _Just because I can use Sound Forge doesn’t mean I know shit about hardware. This thing’s gotta be older than me._

The band was still setting up on the little stage that ran the length of the far end of the hall; with the three-foot rise of the stage, the tallest member had to bend his head to fit beneath the battered semicircle of the walls. He was the bass player, naturally, a dilapidated stork of a man, and he haunted stage right with a melancholy lope. The little, brassy-haired singer, probably about fifty and way bouncier than anyone her age should be, was warming up her voice. The twang of his tuning and rasp of her alto formed part of the sonic background, Lennie’s voice was squeaky, and all around her the hum of volunteers and the random thumps and clanks and rattles and sawing noises provided yet another unneeded counterpoint.

Skye found herself looking longingly at the exit, wondering if she could get away with lying that she needed a smoke break, instead of checking that she had divined the input tags correctly, from the faded ballpoint scrawl on yellowed masking tape that indicated which line went where. As she looked over, the blue metal door opened to let a small woman slip through.

It was her last customer from the Blue Peter, only she’d taken off her leather jacket to reveal a plush black cowl-neck sweater, and she was chatting happily with Doc Halliday over at the registration table.

_Huh. Thought she went home._

Except that the woman hadn’t _said_ that really. _Did I get played? Or am I being paranoid? She maybe just change her mind?_ Skye tried to catch Doc Halliday’s eye, stared at her hard like maybe she could light the woman’s hair on fire with her mind or something, get her to give Skye a signal to let her know if she had suspicions. But the Doc didn’t notice her at all. 

_Probably not a problem. Probably I’m about to look like an idiot._.

“Hey, I’m just gonna… I’ll be back,” Skye said to Lennie, and slipped away from the table, leaving him blinking at her. “Don’t let the band start without me.”

“Oh, yes, everyone comes, it’s a fundraiser after all, of course you should stay,” Doc Halliday was saying as Skye came within hailing distance, and she hove to just behind the woman. “Skye!” the Doc interrupted herself, “what can I do for you?”

“Can you give Lennie the high sign when the drummer gets here, so they can load in? I’ve gotta take a quick powder,” Skye told her, hoping there’d been no noticeable hesitation in her voice before she rolled it out. She forced herself to startle as she turned and came face-to-face with the woman, who was so close her red hair nearly got up Skye’s nose. “Oh, hey! It’s you! Got curious?”

“About the dance?” the woman asked her, and looked around. Her gaze was mildly amused, like wasn’t it quaint how these New Jerseyites lived, and Skye fought not to roll her eyes. It might be an act on the woman’s part, but Skye found her hackles raised in umbrage, like an islander born. _Not admitting that to anyone, not even under threat of Tasha-torture._ “Yeah, I guess I did. Anyway, you said there’d be food, and everything else is closed.”

“Well, you’re in luck; Tom’s bringing over a raft of hand pies, so you’ll get to try what yours tastes like early.” _Pot pies? Seriously, Skye, you can’t come up with_ something _more revealing to talk about? What spy is gonna give themselves away over a frickin’ frozen dinner?_

“I’ll look forward to it,” the woman agreed, and leaned back on the table, to better survey the room. “I’m getting hungry already.” 

“Doors don’t officially open for a half hour,” Skye told her, “But if you went back to the kitchen, I bet Tom’d give you something now. Or tell you what, I can. What’s your preference?”

“Well, I _have_ chicken waiting for me-- the ham, maybe?”

“Sure,” Skye tried to find a reason to stay close, just for a moment longer, while she fingered the phone in her pocket, trying to figure out a discreet way to take a picture or something to compare later. “Wait-- d’you read signal flags? Damn! Wish you’d said something while Des was there. I guess you boat a lot?”

“Not anymore, though a friend and I had some… memorable encounters. He taught me.” The woman smiled a little wistfully, and turned back to Doc Halliday as she finished. “He’s great with boats.”

_Wait._

Skye looked back over at her. Chic black sweater, cinched with a wide black belt, waves of red hair, moved like some kind of dancer-- it… no, see, that was Skye being paranoid again.

_Isn’t it?_

Except… except she’d heard Clint make that joke. She’d heard him make that joke practically every time he set foot in Lola, sadly. Phil’d picked up on it early and had used it when talking with Pepper Potts-- Skye’d heard it on the recording made by the little tie pin. 

_Oh holy shit, really? Now?_

“I’ll just get that pie for you,” Skye said, or thought she said, it might have been more like “I’ll just pie.” Didn’t matter, only getting out of there mattered, into the kitchen where she could do a google image search.

It didn’t take more than two minutes after that, that’s how pathetic Skye was. The woman wasn’t disguising herself at all, just counting on the fact that she no one would expect to see someone like _her_ down on LBI. Basically, she was just walking around pretending she wasn’t herself at all and it had been going spectacularly for her, probably would have kept on working, too, if Skye hadn’t been privy to one of Clint Barton’s running gags.

_I guess that’s how she normally works. Damn she’s good._

The images were grainy but recent-- bystander shots taken from that thing down by DC with the absorbing dude, where Phil had nearly gotten himself squashed. Clint had nearly torn the Blue Peter’s TV out of its wall-mount when he finally saw the footage on replay. Skye hoped that Phil’s TV back on North Bar didn’t get any broadcast channels. Or cable. Because Phil was probably gonna keep doing stupid stuff, and Clint was gonna keep worrying.

Anyway. 

It didn’t take much of a look at the photos to realize they were the same woman-- sure her face was blurred, and she was holding herself differently, and she wasn’t in the same get-up at all but it didn’t fool Skye, not now that she knew what she was looking for.

Especially because now she knew exactly why Clint’d named that damned chicken.

 _Crap_ , Skye thought to herself. _Crap._ So, okay, maybe that really was who she thought it was. If so she had a hell of a lot of work to do, and negative amounts of time to do it in-- she had to cut the woman off from communication without alerting her that something was wrong, and for that, she needed to get back to her laptop-- and probably knock on all the telephone poles along the way for luck. She also needed eyes on the woman every moment-- 

_Where are Kate and America? Fuck! I need my backup!_

She started texting, frantically.

In the main hall, the woman was still standing, laughing with Doc Halliday. Skye took a deep breath, grabbed a pie, and squared her shoulders. As she did, the Doc glanced in her direction-- and winked, before going back to her conversation. 

Well, okay. The Doc had eyes on the Widow.

_At least I know she’s in good hands._

**Two**  
She hadn’t planned on staying nearly as long as she had; Natasha’d just needed to be sure that Frank Barney-- and Coulson-- were here before she left for the island, so she knew she’d be uninterrupted. Barney apparently subscribed to the thirty-minutes-after school of thought on when to arrive at a party, however, and it was 7:30 already and the quonset hut was increasingly crowded. 

The little blue haired lady, who’d introduced herself as Lauren-call-me-Doc, had kept Natasha busy in conversation for a distressingly long time, watching her eat her (really quite excellent) hand pie, bringing her over to the punch table with one frail hand at her elbow, and pressing enough thin waxed paper cups of the magenta koolaid-and-ginger-ale concoction on Natasha that when she’d finally escaped by pleading her bladder, it hadn’t been at all a lie on her part. 

It had also been badly timed; when she’d gone in, the third person in line for two stalls, the crowd had been sparse enough that you could survey everyone. By the time she came out, the thicket of heads around the beer taps and the food table was too thick to spot anyone reliably. Onstage, the band was kicking things off by already going beyond it’s eighties brief with a version of Kirsty Maccoll’s “In These Shoes” that owed more to effort and optimism than actual sultriness. (It didn’t help that the singer was wearing paisley Danskos that were, in fact, more than adequate for riding or mountain climbing, rather than stiletto heels. Not that stilettos had ever prevented _Natasha_ from doing anything.)

So she was stuck looking for Frank Barney, a man she’d only seen one picture of, in the middle of a crowd of people gyrating and milling indifferently under low light in a hall where sound reverberated so badly it all ended up muddled in her ears. In the SI headshot, he’d had a sandy beard and scruffy hair and aquiline nose-- nothing very helpfully distinctive. His expression had been faintly mooncalvish, and he had reminded her of someone. 

(Of Clint-- not _someone_. She saw Clint everywhere the first few weeks he was gone, and at slowly diminishing frequency since. She no longer looked twice at every built blond in a baseball cap. Nor mistake Steve for Clint, seated on a sofa late at night.) 

It wasn’t the easiest ID she’d ever had to make, but it shouldn’t have been _that_ hard. If the plump scowling lady at the fundraising table hadn’t insisted he was here, Natasha’d have been tempted to think he was skipping out.

Maybe he’d picked Coulson up and neither of them had wanted to be around other people for a little. She hoped not. That could make sneaking awkward. 

As it was, if she didn’t know better she’d have sworn Barney was deliberately avoiding her in the crowd.

Natasha slid slowly along the edges of the hall, moving at angles that made it equally likely she was searching for a friend or for the punch bowl. She let her focus blur and spread, waiting for Frank Barney to slip across her sights. There had been several candidates of about the right beardiness and coloration that had proven to be wash outs. Fifteen more minutes and she was just going to head to North Bar and hope. Her vision became a haze of heads and shoulders, couples spinning on the dance floor.

Ah, there, on the dance floor-- light beard, hair flopping in his eyes, prominent nose (much more gnomish than in the picture), broad and oddly elegant neck and shoulders beneath blue flannel--  
Clint?

Natasha slammed her teeth shut, hoping she hadn't said it out loud, and looked again.

It _was_ Clint.

She knew him beyond a doubt, wondered how she could ever have mistaken Steve’s or any other man's back for his. If she'd known him on the docks of Port Klang despite the oversized wetsuit, in the chaos and smoke of Budapest, and through the haze of dozens of dusks the world over, how could she have doubted the certainty with which she'd recognize the rhythm of his step?

Alive. Clint, alive, as she'd hoped all this time. Clint, alive, and whole, and here, and--

 _Why the hell is he here?_

How _the hell is he here?_

_What the hell has he been doing all this time?_

Not lying in an anonymous hospital bed (or, worse, grave) somewhere, clearly. If he’d been injured or sick sometime in the last month, it had passed and left him outwardly whole. 

Despite the rather startling profusion of hair, facial and otherwise, he didn’t look like he’d been sleeping rough. Clint was like a cat; he hid his hurts whenever he thought he could get away with it. You usually knew he was sick only when you caught him not eating. Still, he looked neither tired nor starved. 

In fact, he looked remarkably well.

For a fugitive.

A fugitive who hadn’t contacted his best friend for help.

 _Couldn’t_ , she reminded herself. _Couldn’t contact me for help, because Fury was watching me. And anyone Clint was connected with._ The thought was startling in its intensity, lit up her nerve endings like the Fourth of July.

She could be endangering him just by being in the room with him. 

Natasha was perfectly capable, when she needed to be, of making sure she left no trail electronic or physical that could be followed-- at least by anyone who hadn’t known her under a dozen years. The level of complexity required to do so was… inconvenient, to say the least. She’d have done it, if she’d known-- in order to keep from bringing hell down on Clint, she'd have done anything up to cutting off a hand (so long as Tony could make the prosthesis, naturally). 

Except that she hadn’t known, and there’d been no reason to take extreme precautions just for following _Coulson_. If anyone wanted so badly to know where she had been, more power to them. It was hardly a secret that the Avengers didn't trust SHIELD.

Okay. Maybe not "anyone." But certainly Stark or Fury or….

 _I shouldn't be here, it's not safe for Clint._

Natasha tried to make her feet move, turn herself to go, pretend she hadn’t known him at all so she could go sneak around North Bar and lay a false trail for anyone who might follow her.

 _But... if anyone else is here right now, the damage is already done. If they’re not, I need to warn him. The least, the least I can do is see if I can hug-- help. See if I can_ help.

Anyway, relief was flowing so wildly through her veins, Natasha didn't think she could have stopped herself, if she'd tried.

She had to go to Clint.

It was a goddamned moral imperative.

Every muscle in her was twitching with the need to walk over and turn him around, and see him safe, put hands on his shoulders and feel him whole, and punch him in the solar plexus for worrying her so badly.

She waited until his back was directly to her before she moved, then inserted herself into a knot of dancers all gyrating happily at each other. 

He was near the center of the dance floor, twirling a tall dark haired girl who was clearly enjoying it for all she was worth. Well, _nearly_ all-- she wasn't fondling his biceps the way most of his past dance partners had. They were chatting like old friends, which could mean anything or nothing. Clint on a mission was capable of being the most amiable man in the universe. It was an act, but it had taken Natasha years to realize it was also the enactment of a fantasy-- he was being the Clint he wished the world had allowed him to be. 

This Clint, shaking his ass happily to a Bangles cover, was strangely relaxed for being in the middle of a crowd of probable strangers. He must think someone was watching his back. She couldn't think who-- unless it was the crowd in general. If he’d been here a while-- and his comfort strongly suggested it-- he might theoretically have actually won an entire town over. It wouldn’t be the first time. (The first time, he’d only needed to hold their attention for fifteen minutes, but it had been an exhilarating quarter hour, at least the parts where she wasn’t desperately trying to avoid being blown up.)

Regardless of whether or not he’d wooed and won a vacation town off the Jersey Shore, however, _the entire crowd_ was too many people to guard someone’s back effectively. Natasha sighed and wished she weren't about to remind him of that.

The knot of dancers broke up as the song ended. Clint and the girl dropped hands and paused for a moment, still chatting. Natasha used the opportunity to drift closer, watching the crowd now for any sign that someone else had noticed her headed for him-- or noticed him, for that matter. 

Nothing-- no one paying attention to either of them beyond an occasional glance at her chest or his rear. 

On the little stage, the band was starting up again. The lead singer was sliding into a nice slow rendition of “Perfect Day,” and the bass player was joining the duet with plenty of enthusiasm but indifferent success. Several of the dancers faltered, stepped off the floor to grab punch or hand pies-- or both, double-fisting while the cuddle song lasted.

Clint-- more easily accessible now-- didn’t seem bothered at all. He made grabby hands at his teenage partner, who shook her head at him. The grabby hands were joined by a head-tilt that probably accompanied a sheepish grin, and she gave in to the inevitable and put her hands out, even though she shooting him a look equally compounded of fondness and embarrassment. 

He pulled her forward into a loose cuddle, settling in for the slow song, one hand on her waist and the other travelling to clasp hers and bring it up. She was still shaking her head, smiling now, as they swayed and turned slowly. Natasha sidled up, a satellite slowly syncing up its orbit to re-enter the atmosphere, and when he completed his revolution, it turned him right into her.

"Can I cut in?" she asked him, with what she hoped sounded like nonchalance-- she wasn't sure she'd ever been so uncertain of the effect of her own voice. She didn't give the girl or Clint time to react-- his turn had inserted her naturally between them, like a wedge, and she split him from his dance partner easily. She took his hands as the girl dropped them and kept the spin going.

The girl didn't say a word.

Natasha would think about that later. 

Now was for Clint, warm and alive, and hers again at last.

It was ridiculous how much it affected her; as if she’d become a teenage girl herself. (Not that she knew what it felt like, to be a teenage girl.)

Clint's eyes were shadowed in the low light and half-hidden by the lock of sandy hair falling in front of his face, the crow’s feet at the edges a little deeper than she remembered. The planes of his face looked slightly sharper up close, at least as far as she could tell under his beard-- his wholly unexpected, impossible to assimilate, beard. She saw each individual feature with a clarity that had to be nearly equal to his own when he was facing down a target, but they would not combine into a coherent whole, she couldn't _understand_ what she was seeing for a long moment. Not until he spoke.

"Heya, Nat," he said, and his voice was so warm, solid like his hand on the small of her back, his fingers curled around her other hand, the press of his chest. For whatever reason, the voice was the last puzzle piece she needed, and his face resolved into familiar lines.

He was laughing at her.

Shakily, somewhat wildly, and very circumspectly, but he was laughing at her all the same.

"Clint, you are a jerk," she told him without thinking, frustration burning the shock from her body, and it only increased the shaking in his limbs, drew the smile on his face goofily wide, fluffing up his beard with happiness.

"I missed you, too," he said. "What took you so long?"

"What took me--" she glared up at him in outrage. _What took me so long?!_

He grinned back down, and his hand shifted on her back, and finally everything clicked back into place: Clint Barton here, with her, doing something reckless, a situation so familiar over the years that she didn't bother to dream about it anymore. It felt so good that a sudden spike of fear ran through her.

_He's still in danger._

_I can't lose him again._

Natasha finally found her voice, and growled.

"Clint, what the hell are you doing here? Don't you know it's spook central these days? What's going on? Are you safe? How can I help?" Surely she'd never let such a compromising rush of of questions drop out of her mouth before; she shut her teeth with a snap.

"I've been here for weeks, hell-- a month," he told her, looking more serious now, taking in her clear agitation. _I'll bet. I don't think I was this transparent even in Budapest._ "And I'm all right. Taken care of."

"Taken care of?" she echoed, struggling to make sense of the words. "Clint, you damn well better not be mixed up in anything shady. I will kill you. No-- I’ll get you out if this mess, _then_ kill you." 

“Nat--” he swooped down and kissed her on the forehead, a quick dry press of lips, “From anyone else-- no, I’m not… well. It’s complicated, but it’s not anything SHIELD said it was. Probably. We don’t think.”

 _Probably._ Natasha fought not to roll her eyes. From Clint, it was actually reassuring. At least, it sounded more like his standard runaway train-style mess, and less like something with long-lost relatives or unpaid debts or other complications.

Long-lost relatives. _We_ don’t think. The actual reason she'd come to North Bar shouldered its way back to the forefront of her thoughts, and she snapped before she thought: "Do you know Phil Coulson?" 

She was all but certain of it, even as the words left her mouth, and she had all of a moment to process the implications of his possible answers, the escape routes and the quietest places to take him to be safe, to force him to tell her _everything_ , before he shrugged.

"Sure I know Phil," he said, like she'd asked if the sun came up in the east, "he's right behind you."

And he spun her around, straight into the arms of Phil Coulson himself.

\----

Phil'd had all the warning of one cryptic text an hour ago, and a quick diversion to the sound board at Skye’s frantic head jerk, before he made it to the dance floor. Skye was in full-on multitasking mode, running the sound board at the same time as removing his tie and jacket, and waving a hand at his collar button, while she debriefed him. 

He left tie and jacket draped over her chair, unbuttoned a couple buttons, and rolled up his sleeves as he made his way to the dance floor, already looking around for Clint.

And there Clint was, smack dab in the middle of the milling crowd, all dressed up in Phil’s blue flannel, and best jeans, and second-best watch, dancing with a small redhead. Phil was caught, momentarily, by the clothing-- after a month of Clint moving like sin wrapped in Phil’s clothes it ought to have been old hat, but apparently that wasn’t the sort of thing one got used to.

Natasha Romanov was glaring up at Clint from the secure cradle of his arms, and he was looking down at her like he’d found an unexpected puppy in the henhouse when he went for eggs. She was radiating unease, he, joy. 

Phil swallowed down the ache in his chest-- he'd known Clint missed his Nat. He'd caught Agent Romanov in unguarded moments looking up to rooftops, or just behind her left shoulder, as if she expected to see a shadow there-- he’d been certain she was missing Clint, too. Until he saw them, however, turning together magnetized, he hadn't understood the really fundamental nature of their loss. 

_I wonder if Clint has realized just how much he left behind._

Clint didn't so much as tip a wink in his direction, but Phil didn't need him to. From the moment he’d seen them dancing, he knew what his play was. He sidled closer to them, nodding greetings at various Gansett Lighters as he passed, positioned himself, and had all the warning of "behind you" to open his arms and catch Natasha Romanov when Clint spun her to him. Phil didn't need to be able to look Clint in the eye to know exactly what Clint needed him to do next.

"Ms. Romanov," he said dryly as she ended up in his arms, "how nice of you to visit. I see you met Cousin Frank."

Natasha’s eyes did not do anything so gauche as widen, and certainly her well-disciplined body did not stiffen in his arms, nevertheless Phil was aware that a large number of tumblers were falling into place somewhere in the back of her brain, and she probably already understood far more than he was comfortable with. 

Between Clint and himself, they’d managed to flat-foot her just enough that she was stuck holding on to him, literally and figuratively, until she regained her balance. They needed to slip enough reassurance through her defenses while she was vulnerable that she'd give them a chance to explain before knocking Clint out and dragging him off somewhere.

“Nat,” she breathed, and Phil blinked, caught off-guard himself.

“I didn’t think you liked that?” he asked. “I’d been trying to avoid using it.”

Her laughter was genuine, and oddly intimate, a low little chuckle held close to her chest. 

“It's growing on me-- but that's not it. When I called North Bar-- while you were in quarantine. He called me Nat. And I didn’t notice. Until now, I mean. It didn’t sound out of place to me.” 

_There’s one shoal we didn’t even know we’d managed to miss. How many more are out there?_

"He said he thought you were off your game a little," Phil mentioned, glancing behind her to judge their distance from other couples-- and avoid looking at her for a reaction. Clint had seemed a little bewildered when they’d discussed it during Phil’s brief visit; the same tone of voice he'd had discussing Tony the Hen's broodiness. The idea that his Nat might be operating at anything less than her peak spy goddess capacity had been a travesty to Clint. Natasha clearly agreed with him, from the little noise of disgust she made in the back of her throat. 

“How long have you two known each other?” she asked when he turned to meet her gaze. The space between them as they danced was as carefully calibrated as the distance between two satellites; he didn’t dare break their rhythm as he answered, but he needed _room_ before he could answer that. 

“About a month,” Phil said, spinning her gently away from him then back into the loose cradle of his arm. 

“Coulson,” she snapped, and Phil wondered if her pupils concealed Widows’ Bites; her gaze burned. Her face stayed pleasant and relaxed, as if it was having a different conversation from the one her voice was engaging in. “Don’t lie to me. How long have you known each other?” 

“A month! He washed up on my beach during Fred, with a bullet wound in his shoulder. Natasha, ask him that-- he wouldn’t lie to you.” 

Natasha assimilated this with a scowl, but finally gave her assent. Lying to the Black Widow, Clint had explained, was just a roundabout way of punching yourself in the balls. Messy, convoluted, masochistic, and lingeringly painful. To say Phil was glad she believed him was an understatement of massive proportions.

“Why would you think we’ve known each other longer?” he asked when he thought she’d calmed down a little. It _seemed_ like he’d known Clint longer than that, honestly-- seemed like months, if not ages of the world. That he had yet to see Clint in high summer, stripped to a tank top and glistening with sweat, or bundled in five layers of fleece as snow hit the breakers, was a shock to him. 

_Will I get to?_

The song was headed for the bridge before the final chorus, now, and he turned his attention back to her.

“Agent Coulson,” she said softly, “I _did_ talk to him while you were in quarantine.” 

She thought it explained everything; it wasn’t deliberate opacity on her part. Phil wondered briefly what the hell Clint had said to her on the phone to give her that definite an impression, and raised his glance over her shoulder, searching out Clint where he was dancing with Kate and watching them whenever the dance spiraled them in sight of each other. Clint caught his eye, and his smile broadened just a little.

 _Well, perhaps we’re not fooling anybody_ Phil thought to himself. It was one thing to feel for himself like he'd known Clint forever-- that was as much part of the natural order now as his hens gorging on japanese beetles-- but it was much odder to have someone who'd actually known Clint forever conclude that his feelings for Phil could only have come through a longer acquaintance than a mere month.

Granted, it had been a really _eventful_ month. Those early days under hatches during Fred had to count for at least a week each. Some of that must have shown on his face-- something must have-- because when he looked back down, the Black Widow was smiling up at him through a curtain of red curls turned purple by the colored scrims on the portion of the hall’s track lighting they were currently swaying beneath.

“He washed up on your beach?” she asked, and Phil nodded. “So what happened next?”

“I bandaged him up, fed him soup, and introduced him to my chickens,” Phil told her, and then answered the question she really meant: “and told him I would help him get home.”

He didn’t think he was imagining the way Natasha’s hand gripped his more tightly.

**Three**

"It's a good thing I'm not actually your date, dude, 'cause I'd be really offended right now. What happened to ‘dance with the one that brung you’?" Kate grumbled. Clint tore his eyes away from the swoonworthy curve of Phil’s back, punctuated as it was at the waist with Natasha’s neat hand, and looked at his dance partner. 

Despite her _pro forma_ pout, Kate didn’t actually seem that disgruntled. Between the adrenaline of the last hour, spent waiting to see if Natasha would really show, the bustle of the dance itself, and whatever Kate'd been up to before she arrived, her color was high and her eyes were twinkling with almost Philsian intensity. It was kind of adorable, actually; he fought the urge to kiss her cheek, knowing that would be a transgression past forgiving. 

"You didn't bring me, Kate," he teased, "I brought myself." He fought against the obvious Billy Idol joke, a battle much aided by Wanda Jackson, of all people. The head of the Long Beach Island Shoreline Preservation Society was hovering at the fundraising table, every rotund inch of her radiating frustration at them-- probably because she wanted Kate back to man the table while she took her triumphal turn on the dance floor. Clint shuddered to think what Wanda Jackson shaking her regal rump might do to the dance floor’s other occupants-- which was mean of him.  
She, more than anyone, working in tandem with Lauren Halliday, had been responsible for the tight net Gansett Light had drawn around them. 

He pointed her out to Kate by turning her slightly, while continuing with his previous thought: "If anything, Wanda brought you. D'you think we should ask if she can cut in?"

"Shut up, Cl-- Frank. We've got to keep her on our good side." Kate sighed, "or d'you think I've been ruling Tom out of order every time he tries to amend the native dune plant budget after we've called the question because I _get off_ on committee meetings? If I wanted to be this bored out of my skull, I'd go back to New York." 

"They also serve who take minutes," Clint replied, speaking more to the baffling melancholy that had settled over her features as she mentioned New York, "and it looks like you've got a reprieve." During their brief revolution, Wanda had disappeared and America was sitting at the table, watching Kate and himself. She gave him a quick, solemn little nod, and Clint smiled, then turned Kate so she could see. He felt her shiver in his arms, and wondered just what kind of look America'd given her.

Then Phil met his eye over Nat's shoulder, and _Clint_ shivered. He was not the kind of man who went all weak-kneed over eyes meeting across the dance floor, especially not under circumstances like this-- at least he'd never _thought_ he was. Phil was rapidly proving him wrong on that as well as a lot of other counts, and he wondered what Nat would think about it.

After all, the gamble Clint had taken in making sure Nat found him someplace public, somewhere she’d be forced to _listen_ , was that given the opportunity they could convince her to approve of and even join their little conspiracy. Or at least get her to agree that sandbagging him and drag him off by his ankle would be counterproductive. 

If what Nat saw at the dance didn’t convince her to wait for more explanations, Clint wasn’t sure what happened next. It had never been Nat’s M.O. in the past, to do things _for Clint’s own good_ , but then he'd never been in a situation quite like this before. And he'd committed to a course of action that put a considerable number of people in danger. He couldn't risk her risking that.

Which was why he'd staked himself out like a goat at the dance, when Skye had spotted Nat, instead of going back to North Bar to let her find him in private.

She needed to know exactly how many lives she held in her hands besides his own, and how dear they all were to him. 

No one dearer than Phil, and she was currently saying something to Phil that was making him react with an aggressively unconcerned grace and a small smile. He met Clint's eyes and managed to convey 'come here please but make it casual' with nothing more than a twitch of his eyebrow.

Clint spun Kate out, and crowded forward to meet her so that they moved across the dance floor without seeming to be going anywhere much. It brought them into hailing range of Phil and Nat. 

"She's through with me for the moment," Phil said, and turned Nat out towards him. They were wearing nearly identically polite expressions.

Kate let go of Clint so they could switch partners, her fingers falling reluctantly through his. From the periphery of Clint's vision he could see Phil offering her his hand. Kate had gone pale, but there was no time to question why that was-- Clint had an armful of Nat, was close enough to smell the clean shea butter scent of her hair, feel the compact lines of her spine beneath the smooth thick mohair of her sweater.

He curled her far more tightly into him than was probably comfortable for her, determined to take full advantage of the intimacy a slow dance demanded, because he'd been needing a Nat-hug since approximately five minutes before he'd gone out that high window in Manhattan, and he'd only held himself back earlier to keep from spooking her. Or to keep himself from falling to pieces-- he’d been so damn goofy at the realization he was finally seeing his Nat again that he could barely keep himself upright.

"Clint," she whispered into his chest, "what the hell have you been _doing_?"

"Nat," he sighed, suddenly weary, and paused.

She stiffened against him for a moment-- and then melted, giggling weakly into his shoulder. He squeezed her a little closer, feeling bewildered, and she squeezed him back so tightly his ribs protested. It felt wonderful.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"Nothing." She shook her head. "You’re fine. You’re just really bad for my cold-hearted bitch image.”

“You had one?” he murmured into her hair, beginning to smile. She had one. It wasn’t even entirely a lie, just armor to hide her internal dork. She was a bit like Phil that way; Clint had long suspected Phil’d worn armor of his own back in the Rangers.

“Clint--" she started.

"Can we just--" Clint cut her off. He wanted just Nat, just his friend, for a little more. Was an hour too much to ask before the interrogation started? "-- table that 'till we get home?"

"You're coming back to New York?" Nat asked, stiffening against him again and snapping the question out as if she thought the whole thing smelt fishy. "I thought I'd have to knock you out and drag you if I wanted that."

"You wouldn't get past the door if you tried it, Nat. That's why we waited for you here. Not New York, North Bar. Come home with us, spend the night, you may as well. We can talk in the morning-- I’m not going to run away. And we’ve got at least a day’s worth of stuff to catch up on." Clint told her, and she pulled away from him suddenly, far enough to stare back up into his eyes. 

"Yes," she said quietly, "I think we do. Among other things, why you decided to get an entire town caught in the middle of this mess. If I really wanted to take you with me, they couldn't stop me-- and you’d have endangered them all." 

Clint had the grace to wince.

"Nat I love you, you know that, and you're beyond a doubt the single most badass person I know. But you've got too many morals to do what you'd have to do to get me out of here tonight against my will."

"I could just call SHIELD right now," she told him, "or JARVIS. One press of a button. You know I could."

"Can't, actually, sorry, Nat. Not even if you wanted to-- and you don’t, because you’re just as afraid as I am that if you do you’re essentially handing me over to whoever framed me in the first place. I'd like to take you to North Bar, please, so that these nice people can have working cell phones again. Come with us. Let Phil and me explain-- meet Lucky. Meet Tasha-- oh, man, Nat--” Even in the middle of pleading with her, the thought of her coming face-to-beak with her namesake black hen brought glee-- “you gotta meet Tasha!"

"Who or what is Tasha?" Nat asked him, clearly distrusting the amusement in his voice.

"Your chicken," he told her. "You'll love her. She's an ace at infiltration."

\----

Dancing with Phil Coulson was one of the more surreal experiences of Kate's life to date, narrowly eclipsing even dancing with _Hawkeye_ \-- and that had been weird enough. Clint Barton, who’d slowly revealed his vulnerable dorky underbelly to her as the weeks progressed, was easy enough to get down with, but as soon as the tempo had slowed down, he had turned straight back into an Avenger in her eyes, like a reverse Cinderella. She’d hardly known what to do with herself, and was pretty sure she’d ended up sounding exactly like a disgruntled teenager. 

But it still beat slow-dancing with Coulson, who was old enough to be her father, easily. Not that age was really what was making her so uncomfortable; it didn’t feel like she was dancing with Dad-- or like dancing with Dad would have been if Derek Bishop had ever unbent himself far enough to dance with her-- but it wasn't real slow dancing either, the kind you did with someone you _liked_ , and hoped to get into a dark corner later on. Or out on the beach, under the dock....

Kate's mind _would_ keep on drifting to America, and to her lips and hands and her dark eyes swimming with stars. It was all probably the anxiety-- or maybe the music, because just when she'd think she had her mind settled, was ready to say something to Coulson at last, the singer'd do something stupid like start in on “Dover Beach.” By the time she’d gotten through with the initial “If I had the time, I would run away with you,” Kate was already thinking about how easy it would be, really, to just disappear-- to ask America to fly her off somewhere remote where her Dad couldn’t find her. Like Tahiti. Or Mars.

Somewhere she wouldn’t be dancing with Phil Coulson, which was, she wanted to reiterate, _weird._ Her palms were sweaty and her stomach kinda sour and altogether she was so anxious she wasn’t sure her words were gonna come out right. Coulson _himself_ was all right, and that made it worse. If he’d been awkward or stiff she could have handled it, but he didn’t seem to realize he had any reason to be so. No, he was dancing just fine, pretty sure of his footing (not that that was hard-- they were barely swaying), keeping a little tucked-away, and he felt warm and dry and kinda… _firm_ underneath the fine cotton of his shirt, kinda… disturbingly pleasant to dance with, basically.

So: weird.

“Miss Bishop,” Coulson said gently after a moment, “thank you for helping Clint tonight.”

“Why do you hate me?” she responded, then kicked herself (metaphorically speaking).

“Why do I-- what?” Coulson spluttered, abandoning his pleasant smile and staring at her like she’d asked about his underwear preference. 

“Is it that thing at the Blue Peter still?” Kate babbled on, because if she stopped talking she wasn’t gonna get to the point ever this century. “Because I’m sorry for that, I really am, I mean that was pretty juvenile of me, and ironic too, but I just mean you didn’t have to complain to my Dad.” She took a deep breath.

_No whining! Damnit, Kate, don’t sound younger than you have to._

“I don’t really think--” he started, and she cut him off again with a vehement shake of her head. (And if she shook it so sharply that hair got in her mouth as she did, well, she spit it out again before he could notice.)

“Really, I get it, and if it was just me I’d take whatever I had coming. But it’s going to hurt Clint too, if I’m gone. Skye can’t be everywhere at once! You _need_ me and America, and let me tell you, if you don’t have me, you don’t _have_ America.” 

_So. There._

As she wound down, she noticed that he was still staring at her, eyebrows knit together like Lucky watching Tony the hen try to fit into a feed tub half her size. 

“And you have no idea what I’m talking about,” Kate said, on a sigh. 

“Sorry,” Coulson replied in that stupid light voice of his, lifting his shoulders to punctuate his apology. He didn’t break the slow sway of their dance.

“You narked on me to Dad? While you were busy being BFFs up there in New York?”

“I… _talked_ to your father in New York, yes, once,” he said cautiously, giving her a quick spin and drawing her back with one hot hand against her waist. “I don’t remember saying anything about you except that we’d seen you in Gansett. Should you... not be here?”

 _Should I not be here. If freakin’ only._ Kate wriggled a little, wishing again that she’d worn something a little warmer than a long-sleeved shrug over a tank top. Not that Coulson appeared to notice at _all_ (which she supposed made sense since he was dic-- fuc-- _involved with_ another guy), but _Kate_ felt too exposed. With America the outfit had made her feel sleek and sexy, but next to Coulson she just felt too young, too gawky, too obvious.

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “You didn’t maybe mention that I come out and practice archery on your little island? Or that I yelled at you in a bar? Or that I _punched someone else_ in the nose?”

“Did you punch someone? I must have missed that. Who was it?”

“Jamie something-or-other, but that’s not--” 

He was laughing at her now, those stupid eyes twinkling, and she fought not to growl. 

“Sorry, no, that’s just… don’t worry about that; I’m sure Jamie deserved it.” He shook his head, still smiling a little, and she was reminded of Clint. “No, Miss Bishop, I’m _sure_ I never mentioned any of that to your father. If for no other reason than that if he drags you off home, Wanda Jackson will start asking _me_ whether I’m going to come back in time for the annual budget meeting. And I much prefer to leave that in your capable hands.”

That seemed like more punishment than Kate deserved, too, but she let it pass.

“Yeah, well, he found out _somehow_ , and there isn’t anyone else besides Cousin Emily and America-- and Clint, of course-- well, and Skye… but besides _them_ no one knows what I do on North Bar! And now he wants to… to… I don’t even know what he wants to do yet, but if he sends me to Sweetbriar and I end up having to shank a Charleston deb over who has the highest pinky lift drinking tea? I’m blaming _you_.”

“Don’t be absurd, Miss Bishop,” Coulson told her, and he gave her a vigorous twirl, nearly sending her into the generous backside of a middle-aged person in an oversized sweater and undersized jeans. When she spun back, he continued. “I wouldn’t expect you to actually shank someone over anything less than who gets to wear a purple backless to the formal.”

 _That bastard,_ Kate thought desperately, because first of all, it was unfair that he’d remind her about the Met Gala-- and what was wrong with purple? She _rocked_ purple, and she had great shoulder, everyone said so-- anyway. Anyway, second of all, that shouldn’t have been _funny_. She shouldn’t be finding any of this even _remotely_ funny. It was only her entire future, and Clint’s, that rode on her father’s decision. 

(Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration. Clint could probably get along without her. But without her _and_ America?)

“Don’t change the subject,” she snapped, ignoring Coulson’s _I responded to exactly what you said_ eyebrow. (Was that a product of living with a dog and a flock of chickens for a decade? Had he developed an eyebrow-language all his own with which to commune with his charges?) “If not you, who?”

“There you’ve got me,” he said. “The only people I know who’ve visited North Bar since are the man who took Clint’s fingerprints and Agent Trip--” He broke off and blinked at her.

Kate stopped dead on the dance floor, remembering that _broad_ white smile, that smooth confident voice, and all six-plus feet of Agent Antoine Triplett, walking with them down the little path back to the cottage. Skye had left him in Kate and America’s capable hands, cooling on the front porch and watching the seagulls hop along the dune, while she rummaged around inside for Coulson’s things.

She didn’t _want_ to believe it was him. 

It was just that it was the only remaining option that made sense.

“Yeah,” she said, and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, Coulson looked just as sorry about it as she felt. “Yeah I bet.”

“Hey, you done?” Clint asked from behind her, and Kate didn’t jump at all. Really.

“Yeah?” she said, looking back at him, then at his partner the scary redheaded assassin superhero, who was giving her a mild smile in return.

“Good,” Clint replied firmly, “then I’m cutting in.” 

With that, he pulled Coulson to him, gave a cheeky wink to the Black Widow, and reeled them away with a really gratuitous hip-wiggle as the lady on the stage smacked a tambourine and declared there was no need for livin’ in the past, she’d found good lovin’ and was gonna make it last.

Kate wondered if Clint’d timed it that way on purpose. From the Black Widow’s little snort, she didn’t think she was alone.

“I’m not dancing with you,” Kate said, turning to talk just in time to catch Natasha Romanov looking her up and down. The woman gave her a crocodile smile and shrugged her assent. 

For a moment, Kate was tempted to add “it’s not that you’re not beautiful,” because holy shit, she was gorgeous, tiny and creamy and red-haired and -lipped, with this cinched waist to her sweater that practically redefined hourglass. 

_Wow did I go gay_ fast.

But, beautiful as the Black Widow was, Kate was also morally certain that she could crush Kate’s skull with her thighs, and she didn’t need that in her life.

Correction: she didn’t need _more_ of that in her life. Having a little of it, especially in the form of Miss America Chavez, who was currently threading her way over through the throngs of jiggling asses and bobbing heads, was an okay thing. America was looking at Kate like a woman starved, a woman who knew _exactly_ how Kate tasted, and who the fuck would be stupid enough to deny a woman with that kind of tongue anything?

“Hey, chica, time for a dance?” America asked, coming right up to her without slowing and crowding breasts-first into her space. (Not that America could really help the part of her anatomy that hit first, she was just generous in that area, but Kate couldn’t help noticing them, either.)

Kate allowed that yeah, she could probably manage a dance.

\----

At least fifty percent of Clint’s butt wiggle had been completely unnecessary, Natasha was certain. It was a parting message to her, dots and dashes delivered through the medium of his gyrations, so obvious a five-year-old could have read it. Coulson appeared to be enjoying the wriggles, though. After his first startled moment, he had chuckled into Clint’s neck, his blush obvious even in the hazy light of the dance floor. Natasha folded her arms and watched them go-- which wasn’t far.

A dangerous edge still lived in her chest, cutting whenever she tried to take a deep breath and focus, and she didn’t think she could have handled letting them go out of her sight.

Clint, with his raptor’s gaze, had seen that. Of course he had; he knew her from underneath her skin. Coulson, with his deceptive mildness and the way his laugh had crept in at her edges since she’d first heard it, he’d seen it too. They were keeping close, even though it meant letting her be a voyeur in a moment they had to wish was more private. The two of them were so transparently newly lovers, incapable of not broadcasting their mutual satisfaction into the night, that just watching them felt like an intrusion.

There wasn’t much else to be done, unfortunately, once she’d checked her phone and found the little no service circle mocking her from the top margins of the screen. 

Any trackers on her would be unable to broadcast, too, Clint had explained. Just for now. Hopefully Tony wasn’t looking for her and panicking at the absence of a signal. Clint hadn’t explained _how_ they’d done it, but from what he didn’t say, she gathered that the inner circle of the conspiracy contained at least three more people. She’d clearly met two entirely-too-young accomplices just now, before they wafted away on waves of lesbian lust. (Natasha winced-- she might be getting fed up with romance, at least the Long Beach Island variety, but that mental image was just uncalled-for.) There was at least one person still in reserve, however, who wasn’t just protecting them out of a general sense of island camaraderie, but who was in deep. 

She really hoped it wasn’t another teenage girl. Two was more than enough.

“They do look lovely, don’t they, dear?” 

Natasha turned to find the little blue-haired lady from earlier standing just behind her. What had she called herself? Halliday. Lauren Halliday. She was smiling up at Natasha from her little height, her face wide open and beaming. It was rare for the Black Widow to feel like she’d just wandered into someone _else’s_ web, but just for a moment she felt silk stick to her feet.

“Who does?” she asked, even though she knew.

Halliday nodded at Clint and Coulson, who’d somehow managed to turn into one continuous organism there on the dance floor. There _was_ space between them-- “He’s On the Beach” wasn’t precisely a slow song, and Clint, at least, could do a white-person bop with the best of them-- but the distance didn’t seem to matter. Neither did the fact that Coulson danced like a fifty-year-old ex-Army Ranger. They were so busy staring into each others’ eyes that the space between them might as well have not existed and their hands, flexing on each other’s hips, might have been welded there. 

“Is that common knowledge?” she asked. It couldn’t hurt too badly to admit to curiosity; the woman clearly had her number already-- or enough of it to know that Natasha was a threat of some sort, who needed careful handling.

For an answer, the woman waved her hand behind her, and put a finger to her lips.

“Told you, Jamie,” a gruff male voice was saying, just out of her line of sight to the right. Natasha checked her nails-- and her peripheral vision. Older guy, huge moustache, dusting of tightly-curled hair going from salt-and-pepper to pure salt, button-up shirt and slacks over ancient muscle now running to fat-- wearing both belt _and_ suspenders, for the love of everything. The smaller, portlier, freckle-faced man next to him grunted. 

“Fine, Chief. Fine. You were right. It’s not natural, though.”

“Damnit, Jamie, this is the twentieth centu-- twenty-first. Sorry. _Twenty-first_ century, and no one gives a crap what two grown men get up to on their own time anymore. About time Coulson found someone.”

Natasha glanced over at Lauren Halliday, who was staring straight ahead with a little smile curving her face, looking not at all put out by the conversation going on behind her.

“No that’s not… I don’t give a fuck, anyway it’s not my ass, is it?” Jamie protested. “It’s just that they’re _cousins_ , Chief. And we’re not from West Virginia, all right?”

There was a brief pause in the conversation while Natasha and Lauren Halliday and Jamie and Chief all contemplated the scene laid out before them.

“Yeah all right. I’ll give you that. Hopefully they’re not that close of cousins or anything, ‘cause I’ll tell you now I’d hate to lose Barney from the fire brigade. He could just lift some of those vacation houses up off their foundations, if we needed to get people out, swear to god. If we’re gonna lose Coulson, we gotta get something in return.”

This was undoubtedly true-- and it made Natasha cold. 

One way or another, after all, losing one or both of them was inevitable-- and probably sooner than later.

“Eh, if Barney keeps shaking his rump like that, we’re not gonna lose Coulson for long,”Jamie said, and that seemed to settle the argument.

Hell, Natasha had to admit he had a point.

She really didn’t want him to have a point.

This entire thing was dangerous enough without the two of them distracted by each other’s… _rumps_. Rumps could be disastrous in their line of work.

“You all, you all seem very fond of Frank and Cou-- Phil, here,” Natasha said, when Lauren Halliday had turned back to her with a triumphant, if somewhat bird-like, smirk. 

“Oh yes, dear. We would hate to see anything bad happen to them,” Halliday told her, then held out her hand to be shaken. 

Natasha took it slowly; it was as warm and dry as any old lady’s hand; skin parchment-smooth and bones and veins prominent, but Halliday gripped her own palm firmly, and set her other hand on top of it in a soothing gesture.

“I don’t think you properly introduced yourself, earlier, but welcome to Gansett Light, Ms. Romanov. Any friend of Frank and Phil’s is a friend of ours. Anyway, it’s good to see superheroes descend from their Tower a bit.”

“I trust I won’t disappoint you,” Natasha told her, smiling nearly against her will. Elderly lady conspiracists were hardly better than teenage girls, in the abstract, but in Lauren Halliday’s case she was prepared to make an exception. “I’d hate to see anything bad happen to Frank, either.”

“Oh certainly not, and it’s logical that’s your priority,” Lauren Halliday said, patting her hand before releasing it. She hadn’t lost any of her smug. _My god, I don’t think she’s faking it. She really_ does _think she can stop me just by saying so._ Halliday also didn’t look like the kind of little old lady who had that kind of superpower, but a long life had taught Natasha never to assume. 

“I’m glad you understand,” Natasha told her.

“As long as you understand that they’ve become a package deal,” Halliday replied, and her face was far too kind by half. _A tiny little blue-haired wrinkled battle axe_ , Natasha thought, _and I hope I turn out like her._

“I’m beginning to see that,” she admitted.

As Natasha watched Clint dance with his partner-- or whatever Phillip Coulson was to him at the moment-- she realized it had never really been a choice, to spirit Clint away and hide him somewhere safe, any more than it had ever really been an option to drag him back to the Tower to rally the Avengers around him.

North Bar and its secrets had brought her down here; now that she’d discovered one of them, she had little choice but to go and trust that Clint would pour the rest in her lap.

**Four**

“Before the snow flies, you’ll want to winterize Lola,” Phil said, almost to himself, and Clint nodded, even though Phil was looking out past Lola’s windscreen, not at him.

“I know. And consider putting her away and renting something with more cover from Lennie down at the marina. Phil, we talked about this.” He carefully didn’t look over at Nat, who had been sitting silent in the seat behind them ever since they’d piled into Lola after the dance. Nat was biding her time, he knew, and knew also that he and Phil weren’t out of the woods yet by any means. If he couldn’t convince her that their plan had the best chance of success, that all the secrecy was necessary, if he couldn’t convince her that Phil was acting only with Clint’s best interests at heart (or in other places), they were screwed.

_Or maybe Nat’ll end up having another option, and you’ll agree with her to leave, either to hide somewhere else or to go back to New York, find a way to talk to Steve, to SHIELD, set things right?_

And leave behind North Bar, with Lucky and the chickens and his flock of unexpected allies, more quickly than expected. Which would be safer for them, after all. Clint should be grateful for it, should be relieved that Nat’s appearance likely signaled the beginning of the end, one way or another.

Shouldn’t be wondering just what the Chief would say when his latest recruit disappeared only partway through his training. 

Or whether Kate would just quit on Wanda Jackson and the Preservation Society, once Clint left. And what she would do after, whether she’d confine herself to Gansett Light or go back to New York, and whether he’d ever see Hawkeye in the news again, with her purple dress and her golden bow.

Or where Skye would even _go_ , whether she’d continue with the Rising Tide, keep trying to take down Quinn on her own.

(Oh, god, they were both likely to get themselves killed some day, they shouldn’t either of them be allowed out on their own. Skye was on her own, no less-- at least Kate had America. 

On reflection, that might not be better.)

And of course, there was the question of what it would mean for Phil. For him and Phil.

Phil, who was looking more relaxed with each boat length they put towards North Bar, each breath he took of cold, wet, salty air. Not that he’d looked bad at the dance-- he’d looked the exact opposite of bad. Clint had never judged his distance with a dance partner so finely as he had with Phil; one wrong move and he’d have cracked. Doc Halliday would have had to kick them out for indecency. Yet at the same time it felt like validation of every moment of his existence up to that point, that Phil was there dancing with him in public. 

This, though, was Phil coming home, filling up his lungs with brine and breathing out starlight, and even Nat lurking in the shadows at his back didn’t seem to phase him. 

Clint leaned back against the instrument panel and took him in, bluelit by the instrument panel and fading into darkness at the edges, utterly enthralling. 

“You’ll need to do it soon, she’s delicate,” Phil said, clearly unaware that Clint was _trying_ to moon over him. “I know you have a lot on your plate--”

“Phil,” Clint stopped him, one hand over Phil’s on the wheel. “I know. I’ll get a rental. I only kept her out because I thought you’d want one last weekend with her.”

Phil’s face collapsed into ruefulness as he looked over at last. Clint stopped fighting the urge-- and reached over to bop him on the nose.

Behind them, Natasha gave a strangled little sound, barely audible over the grind of the motor. 

_What? A guy can’t bop another guy’s nose when he’s being adorable?_ Clint did not say. It was a near-run thing, though-- if he weren’t afraid of undermining Phil’s authority in front of an Avenger, he’d have done it. 

(It was odd to think of Nat that way: Avenger over friend. Like he was seeing with eyes not his own.)

He did smile at her, risking the glance, and found her looking back at him with a quiet face. Not the kind of quiet face that boded imminent explosions and lots of screaming, thank god-- that was an iced-over face, with dark water flowing beneath it. This one was just Nat thinking, and he’d given her plenty to think about. They’d declared a moratorium on continued conversation until they could get inside the cottage.

Privately, Clint had decided that they weren’t going to start talking until he had Nat curled up on the window seat in the den, a fire in the fireplace, and Lucky in her lap.

See her get out of _that_ one.

“I do appreciate it,” Phil said, and it took Clint a long moment to remember he was referring to the boat. “I missed her.”

“Just her?” Clint leered at him. Nat’d once called it his randy gnome look, which was entirely unfair. (Except Clint had later practiced it in front of a mirror and… okay… maybe a little. His goddamn nose, that traitor.) It had been well-appreciated in the past, however, and it worked this time, too. Phil smiled, and if he was shaking his head it was mostly helplessly.

“Well. And maybe Lucky.”

“Ah, yes. Can’t forget Lucky.” Clint sidled closer to him, and Phil reached out a finger to trace along the open front of his anorak-- once Phil’s, now pretty much co-opted for good. Wearing the damn thing made Clint feel all manly in a way he hadn’t expected,as if Phil’s particular brand of educated loner was rubbing off on him.

“And,” Phil continued, as the finger dipped lower, “maybe the chickens.”

Clint slapped his hand away and glared at him, though it was hard through the laughter bubbling up from his chest.

Anything he might have said was interrupted by the sound of a motor, growing closer in the dark, and Phil looked over past Clint’s shoulder, searching the night sea.

“Huh,” he said. “Wonder if that guy’s coming from the mainland? Seems late.”

“We’re out late, too,” Clint replied, keeping his eyes on Phil. There wasn’t any tightening yet around his brow to indicate that he was seriously worried, but he wouldn’t have said anything if there wasn’t more than idle curiosity there.

“Is the mainland far in that direction?” Natasha said, and Phil shrugged.

“Far enough. Could also be someone who got lost in the dark.”

“Who would visit North Bar while it was empty?” Natasha asked, ignoring that option-- because none of them really believed it was a poor lost mariner. 

“While it’s empty? No one. If they thought I was there, or that Frank Barney was? Any one of a half dozen people, but they were all at the dance tonight.”

“Yes, your neighbors are… very attentive.” Natasha stretched out against the little built-in bench, the better to watch them both, and Clint watched her right back.

She did look _good_ in Lola, a streak of pale skin and black cloth and against the wood, which was deep burgundy in the shadows. The dark water played behind her, turning her ghostlike. Hell, she looked more at home in such a beautiful machine than he did. 

What she would look like on North Bar, he was almost afraid to find out.

“They’re dedicated, I’ll give them that,” Phil muttered about his friends and neighbors.

“Dedicated? They’re practically co-dependent, Phil,” Clint replied. “Between the Chief and Doc Halliday and the Preservation Society, not to mention the dogs and handlers you’ve run with on SAR callouts, I can’t go even one visit to town without a ‘how’s Phil doing? When’s Phil coming back?’ Really fucking big shoes to fill, man.”

_And you know what they say about big shoes…._

“Wow,” Nat said, “and to think Stark called you a hermit.”

“Well, to be fair--” Phil began, but Clint beat him to it, which was a feat in itself given that he was about two words away from laughing so hard his sides burst.

“Phil’s the only one who believes that,” he said, and got a glower for his trouble.

“I’m only on the main island about once a week, Clint. Except for weeks I was on call at the firehouse. Then more often, obviously. And people visit me-- visited me-- maybe half that often. Until you came. And S-- and the others. That’s not a lot of interaction.”

“Sure, unless you claim to be a hermit. Phil, you’re a crap hermit.”

“You really kind of are,” Nat broke in, and Phil glared at her.

“Perhaps compared to living in Avenger’s Tower, where it’s impossible to get away from other people by day or night, but--”

He broke off as Nat jumped up and grabbed at her pocket.

Her phone was buzzing frantically and in no particular order, a random pastiche of short bursts and longer double beeps.

“Huh.” Nat said, which was really all that needed to be said. 

Either they’d passed out of the radius of Skye’s signal jamming, or she’d relented and brought the satellite connections back online. (It did scare him, more than a little, that Skye could do that-- not really at will, apparently, since it had taken her several days to crack the necessary systems and set up the interrupts to island service for when she needed them, but hell, that was scary enough. The really frightening part was that after setting it up, she’d been able to disrupt communications on the entire island with a swipe of her phone. He wondered if she knew half her own genius.)

“Forget to tell people where you were going?” Clint asked Nat, and he noticed Phil turned his head to try and watch her in his rear view mirror. She was flicking rapidly through messages.

“Tony’s freaking out a little, yes,” she said. 

“It’s as if he doesn’t know you,” Clint replied. “You’re never in danger, it’s the rest of us who are.” 

She gave a one-shouldered shrug in reply. 

“Or maybe he’s more nervous now than he used to be, Clint, since certain people leapt out of his windows.”

“I--” _hadn’t really considered that possibility_ Clint realized. 

It hardly made sense for Tony to get nervous about possible abductions; Clint hadn’t been kidnapped, he’d just up and gone. Not the same thing at all. He realized Nat was waiting for some kind of input from him-- or Phil, who was watching him carefully. 

“I don’t know what he’s thinking, but he can probably find you now, right?” he finished. 

“Just tell him the truth-- you followed me home,” Phil said carefully, and Nat’s glance shot over to him. He caught her looking, their eyes meeting in the rear view mirror. “You’re curious and paranoid; I doubt you’ll surprise him at all.”

“Perhaps not,” she agreed, drawing it out slowly on her tongue. Clint felt the weight of their coming conversation settle over them, stifling as a blanket, and sighed.

North Bar was just ahead now, and it was good. He and Phil would dock, get out, be greeted by the usual rhythmic thunk of waves against the pilings, see the dune grass waving, the little lopsided face of the cottage grinning at them from the gap between the dunes themselves. Nat would look like an elegant little patch of darkness walking ahead of him on the dock, into his ho--

“Wait,” he said, and straightened, “I didn’t leave that light on.” 

“That light” was the low blue lantern at the end of the dock. He’d meant to light it; just forgotten in his rush. Was quite sure he’d forgotten, since he’d remembered halfway to Long Beach Island, and looked back.

“Well, hell,” Phil said, and sped up.

**Five**

Natasha let them go first, once they’d tied up the runabout. Neither Clint nor Phil had been carrying guns, but Phil’d picked a belaying pin up from the little skiff that rode high on the other side of the dock. He held one out to Clint, too, but Clint shook his head.

Natasha had no such compunctions; she’d drawn the Widow’s Bites out from under her jacket.

There’d been no one in the shadows beyond the dune as they came in, no sign of life at all beyond the susurrus of grass and bare branches from the low planting outside the cottage’s porch. Natasha wished she’d had time to take in more of the little house, beyond noticing that it was dark. 

Phil led the way up the porch and inside, working the lock with silent fingers, as Clint veered off around the side-- headed, she assumed, to a back entrance. 

Inside, the hallway was narrow, carpeted with a faded oriental throw, a neat row of jackets and hats and flannels lined up on hooks on the left-hand wall. Phil directed her to one side, where a narrow hallway ended in a single step down into a den. He went straight, up the stairs to what was presumably a set of bedrooms or an attic.

Between the two of them they soon had the cottage swept clean, moving silently in the warm dark, stirring up nothing but dust motes.

 _I thought there was a dog?_

She was back in the den, having cleared a little room with a daybed, a box-filled porch, and the kitchen, when she heard movement behind her. She spun around to find Phil back in the narrow hallway, straightening. He fiddled with something on the wall, and the hall flooded with yellow light.

“Clear,” he said, rather unnecessarily, Natasha thought.

She nodded and slipped up to meet him, coming up into the light blinking. The cottage transformed itself from cave to cozy. For some damn reason, she had a sudden lonesome vision of Clint standing on the staircase, retreating out of her sight.

_Idiot, he’s not lost, he’s just outside._

Phil beckoned her through into the kitchen, making a complex movement with his hand that she realized, after a long moment of confusion, meant _sweep for bugs_. Right, of course. 

“Stark built this, it should do a thorough job,” she said, holding up her phone. It was an understatement, and they both knew it. She could probably have hacked into the Pentagon from the phone, if she’d really wanted to, or set off ICBMs (again, if she’d really wanted to.)

Phil nodded and waved her on, then went over to a cabinet and opened it, taking out a tin of teabags. As she watched, he pulled out one bag, and carefully opened it, spilling tea into his hand.

Well, tea, and a tiny little device that he began to wave around the left-hand side of the room. Natasha did the same with the right-hand side, and then they went over each other’s ground just to be safe.

The Starkphone found a bug in the cordless landline phone-- a relic of the 90s-- sitting on the counter, and one beneath the molding on one of the windows.

An amateur, slapdash job. Phil was watching her work closely. His mysterious little teabag device found both those and a bug in the clock above the sink, that she couldn’t reach.

“Clean,” she said at last, as she finished waving the phone over the little basket by the door that seemed designed to collect all sorts of domestic detritus; pens, pins, toothpicks.

“Well,” he said, “that’s both reassuring, and disturbing.” 

“How so?” she frowned, and he reached past her and pulled out a little Captain America’s shield tie pin-- probably the same one he’d worn the first day she met him.

“This is active. Clint and I keep it on, just in case something happens to him while I’m gone, so we have evidence,” he said. It was a listening device? He’d brought a listening device into JARVIS’s domain? And lived? She stared down at it. Waved the Stark device over it again. 

Nothing.

“Huh,” she said. 

“Yes,” he agreed, then waved the teabag device over it. The thing beeped faintly. “Aha, well, at least we know you can use another dose of poison as a cure.”

“Where did those come from?” she asked, and he shrugged.

“Ian Quinn, I think, originally.”

He seemed so unconcerned that it actually took Natasha a moment to realize there was a good reason why slush was filling her veins. 

“Explain that,” she said, and as she did, the door burst open, and three chickens, a stumbling dog, and a wild-eyed Clint, tumbled through.

“Clint!” Phil exclaimed, starting forward, then-- “Lucky! Not again!” 

The dog skittered up to him, paws and legs shaking, and collapsed into his arms as he knelt on the kitchen floor.

Clint shooed the chickens back outside and shut the door, then flipped something out of his pocket and onto the wooden kitchen table.

“Yeah, they drugged Lucky again,” he growled, “the rat bastards.” 

“I’m beginning to take this very personally,” Phil added, as the forlorn yellow mutt looked up at him, whined, and tried to scrabble closer.

“At least they didn’t kill him?” Natasha asked, and Clint glared at her. She shrugged.

It was true, after all.

“One good thing,” Clint said, and gestured at the little black box he’d tossed on the table, “that motion capture camera we set up yesterday has been recording. I think we might have caught him. Or her. Or… well.”

“Let’s take a look,” Phil said, straightening so suddenly Lucky half came with him, caught in his arms. Phil looked down at his armful of dog and sighed.

It was the matter of a few minutes to get Lucky settled in on the bench seat, and then they all sat down around the kitchen table. Clint hooked the camera up to a laptop he’d brought in from the den.

The footage was grainy, and just a very few seconds long, but it was enough to give Natasha a sense of dawning surreality she hadn’t had since she was very small, and very deep in the woods. 

Perhaps it was all a little Blair Witch Project, or so Clint would say. The shaky cam, the night vision distorting colors into pale white and deep black, the way the figure flitted across the camera’s view of the back porch.

Though all the trappings were there, Natasha didn’t believe in ghosts.

Had never believed in ghosts growing up, and refused to do so as an adult.

But that was Felix Blake she’d just seen on camera, breaking into the cottage they were now sitting in.

And neither Clint nor Phil seemed all that surprised.

“Fuck,” Clint growled, distaste in his voice that she’d never expected to hear turned on their Agent Blake, “I guess he got curious.”

“Very much so,” Phil agreed. “Fury must have talked.”

“What,” Natasha snapped, more than done with the night and all its absurdities and past any sort of smoothness, “the hell is going on?”

\----

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time:  
>  ~~The three scenes I didn’t get to in this chapter.~~ Natasha meets Clint’s flock and Phil’s chickens, Kate and her Dad, and Skye finally makes headway.
> 
> This chapter's [tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/103436461201/washed-ashore-chapter-18-something-in-the-air) includes the Unofficial Washed Ashore Soundtrack. 
> 
> Oh, look, another 14,000 word chapter that started out as half a chapter in the outline. I’m starting to think I’m writing Zeno’s fic: I’ll split each chapter and come nearer and nearer the end but never get there. (I will get there, I promise. I pray.) With this kind of word count, every-other-Sunday posting will continue through… oh dear, the new year. Wow. Still, the posting schedule is _working_ ; other fics are getting written, sick children are getting taken care of, it’s all good.


	19. The Exposition Fairy Sails Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> North Bar needs better soundproofing, the Exposition Fairy pays a visit, expected visitors fail to visit, and unexpected visitors show up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory Chicken Note: The chicken still isn’t a shapeshifter.

**One**

She awoke to the same set of sounds that had accompanied her to sleep-- the rhythmic squeak of bedsprings filtering down from the attic room above her. Natasha lay still for a moment, staring up at the ceiling through the blackness, before she glanced over at her phone on the little shaker table next to the daybed to find the time. 5:00 AM. 

_That had better be round two I'm hearing, not a continuation of last night's activities._

On reflection, five hours was a little long for even Clint to... no.

Reflection was a bad idea. Going back to sleep would be far better. Natasha turned over, coiling herself farther into the worn comforter, cuddling her bare legs as close to her body as possible to combat the cold that filtered through the covers. _Sleep._

_Squeaka squeaka squeaka squeaka squeaka_ went the bedsprings, at a rapidly increasing pace. Natasha had a brief moment's hope that it meant things were, um, coming to a head, and it would be quiet again soon.

It _was_ quiet. For a moment.

Then the squeaks started again, slower now, accompanied by a rattle that could only mean someone had grabbed onto a headboard and hoisted, and the pace probably meant someone else had--

_Nope!_

There was going to be _absolutely none of that._ Natasha flung the covers off and leapt out of bed, ignoring the chilly morning air. She grabbed for her pants in the dark, rummaging a bit as she tried figure out where they could possibly be. All she had was a vague memory of dropping them the night before as she'd stumbled in to sleep at last. 

She needed not to be hearing this. Her brain was far too talented at eavesdropping. The last thing she wanted was to imagine Phil Coulson in flagrante, either spreading or being spread, either sweaty or flushed-- and unfortunately, she and Clint had been intimate long enough (in many senses of the word) that she could far too easily picture what his thighs might be doing, shaking with--

"Fuck!" she said aloud. She grabbed her sweater and her phone, and slammed out of the guest room wearing only her bra. Not like anyone was going to be around to _see_. The other humans in the house were preoccupied at the moment.

It was slightly lighter in the den, deep gray with the pre-dawn light filtering through the bay window. A nightlight in the hall trickled its soft pink glow down the step. Quieter, too-- the master bed must be directly above the little guest room. Natasha sighed in relief and drank in the still air. 

Lucky raised his one-eyed gaze to her from the depths of the leather sofa to greet her. He whined softly, the lonesome, long-suffering sigh of a dog banished from what he considered his rightful place.

Natasha failed to remain unmoved by his plight.

"Budge over," she said to him as she pulled on her sweater, and she followed her order by climbing onto the couch next to him. Between the afghan from the couch back, flung over her shoulders, and the warm dog rapidly settling around her legs, she was far more comfortable there than she had been on the daybed. Even if the lingering dark settled heavily in the corners of the den, showing a distinct tendency to loom.

_Stupid imagination. Nothing here at all. Just peace. And quiet. Blessed quiet._

Lucky sighed heavily and adjusted himself a final time, laying his jaw heavily on her thigh, just within easy scritching range. Natasha had never cared one way or another for dogs, but she knew what was polite for a guest and performed her duty, digging in hard behind his ear, until he trembled and whined.

"Locked out of the room, huh?" she asked him, as he pressed against her hand. "New development for you? Takes some getting used to, I know."

Lucky whined a little, and Natasha tried to beat down the sympathy she was feeling on his behalf. _I am not bonding with Phil Coulson's mutt over this. It would be absurd._

A faint muffled yell drifted down the stairs, and she and Lucky both jumped and looked at each other.

"Perhaps staying over was a bad idea," she told Lucky, who nuzzled her. _Though what choice did I have?_

None, really. Any faint chance she might have thought there had been, that she'd learn enough that night to decide her course of action and leave, had disappeared when she'd seen the dim night vision footage of her dead mentor flitting across Coulson's porch.

By unspoken agreement, Clint and Coulson had tabled whatever pitch they'd wanted to make to her last night, in favor of a generous application of hot tea and rye whiskey. While she drank, the alcohol wafting up in the steam to choke her, she listened to a ghost story, told around a kitchen table.

When they began, Natasha'd been shocked at how far back in time the story took them. Two decades gone, back before Felix Blake had even existed, Felix Hollis had lived a whole other life, had fought and fucked-- and died, for a given definition of died-- at the side of a Phil Coulson and a Nick Fury (or a Marcus Johnson) who were utterly unfamiliar to her, all of them distorted by the passage of years. 

She didn't even try to reconcile the two ghosts, Holly and Blake, into one man, to trace the evolution of one to another. Natasha, of all people, knew what it was to have multiple selves, to let one slip away and raise another in its place. 

When she had first come to SHIELD, clinging to Clint Barton's arm and Director Fury's coattails and her own tattered sanity, Natasha had assumed that Felix Blake would resent her; assumed, honestly, that most SHIELD agents would resent her. Fury had assigned her to work with Clint partly at her own request-- he was her shield and her safe passage in the organization, so long as she stepped in his shadow. Blake could disapprove of her, of their treatment of him, but so long as she stuck with Clint it would be all right. Anyway, she couldn't imagine Blake would be willing to work with either of them again.

Except that Clint hadn't allowed her to stick to his shadow for longer than it took him to figure out what she was doing. He'd drawn her to his side as his equal, despite her probationary status-- even showed an alarming tendency to trail after her instead, if she let him. And Blake had worked with them after all, somewhat to Clint's shock. 

"Tell me why," she'd challenged Blake during their first meeting alone, and he'd smiled that beautiful, predatory smile at her. "We walked all over you."

"Yeah. That's why," he said. "You and Barton are a fuckin’ force of nature together. You'd walk over any agent in this organization, the two of you, and never even realize you were. It would get you into trouble, but worse yet-- it’d hold you back. D'you think Fury brought you here just to clip your wings?"

"And instead he assigns us a bird tamer?" she asked him-- and if she'd perhaps so arranged her body as to seem a very pretty little bird to tame, well, she'd been young too and her training was hard to break. In the event, Blake had glanced down, then up, the length of her body with that faint smirk of his unchanged. 

"No, Agent Romanov. I don't think of you as a bird, or any other fucking metaphor. That's why Fury chose me-- I know when to get the hell out of the way. I'll be the respectable one on the team, keep us all in good with the rest of SHIELD. And you two-- as long as you keep landing whatever insane leaps you take, that's all I ask."

"And you bask in reflected glory?"

"If it makes you feel better to think of it that way, sure," he shrugged. "I've been used to black ops all my adult life. It doesn't bug me if no one knows what I've done, so long as the people who gave me the job appreciate it. Ask Fury; you're hardly the first seat-of-the-pants flyer I've supported. I just need you let me."

He kept that promise. By the time of the Chitauri Invasion, they rarely worked together, but Blake still knew what they needed, when they needed it, and not having him behind them in those horrible first days after seemed an entirely gratuitous injury. If his death had winded her, it had taken Clint out at the knees.

So she found she understood entirely why Phil Coulson had fled New York for North Bar after seeing Felix Blake walking SHIELD’s halls, and why just listening to the story made Clint shift and mutter, one hand gripped tightly over Coulson's. 

Still, the sight of their clasped hands unsettled her. She liked Coulson, but _trusting_ him? Clint did, wholeheartedly, but Clint.… At the best of times Clint had a tendency to bestow his trust in odd places-- on a barely-ex Red Room assassin, for instance. Coulson was still a puzzle: a man who'd left his quiet, apparently fulfilling, life in a somewhat-creepy cottage on a fairly desolate low island, in favor of an outside chance at helping someone he'd known less than a month beat a conspiracy involving one-- or perhaps all-- of a number of deadly foes. Quinn, SHIELD, the Avengers, Coulson had walked straight into the middle of them for Clint.

He was either unfortunately insane, playing an angle so esoteric you’d need a third-degree rite of initiation to work it out, or an honest man and the best improviser she'd ever seen. Two of the possibilities led to heartbreak for Clint, but the third... the third might just be life-changi--

" _Phil!_ " 

The cry echoed down the stairway, and Lucky and Natasha were both halfway off the couch before the tone of it registered. 

They settled back down quickly and avoided each other's eyes-- or eye.

"Perhaps we should try to sleep again?" Natasha asked Lucky, who whined at her. They settled down under the ratty afghan, and no further cries disturbed them.

\----

When Natasha awoke for the second time, the den had taken on a light wash of color, gray giving way to clear pale light, and Clint was coming down the stairs, whistling to himself. Lucky had deserted her sometime during her nap-- probably the moment he felt his master's bed was safe territory.

She poked her head up over the couch. Clint turned at her movement and paused, framed in the hallway, morning light delineating each feature in breathtaking detail. His hair and beard were sleep rumpled, and he'd dragged a frayed henley on over a pair of carpenter's jeans slightly too small for him. _Because he's been wearing Coulson's clothing. Of course he has._

"Hey," he said softly, the word warm around his dawning smile, "I'm gonna put coffee on. Want some?"

Natasha wanted some very badly. 

By the time she'd found and finished in the bathroom the coffee was brewed and poured, and Clint had a second round in the french press. _Three of us. Right. Is Coulson coming down soon?_

He'd also found time to wet and tame his hair-- probably by sticking his head under the kitchen sink-- and had scrounged up socks and boots. It gave him a finished air that calmed her considerably. This Clint, she could talk to, despite the beard and shag and different wardrobe. 

_And how much of this shy-girl nonsense on my part is due simply to_ seeing _him again so unexpectedly, rather than seeing him in love_?

Bah. Coffee before conundrums. She made grabby hands, and Clint obligingly pressed a mug into them. He waited until she was nose-down in the aromatic steam before he spoke.

"Sleep well?" he asked, and she snorted hot coffee mist.

"You're up early, is there an agenda?" she asked instead, and deliberately didn't look at him as she sipped.

"Awwww Nat," he drawled, like he meant to tease her, but she thought there was a note of apology in it. "Did we wake you up? I'm sorry-- we're not really used to...." 

She looked up when he trailed off, to find him blinking a little, a kind of cut-short look on his face.

"Being quiet?" she prompted him, "or having anyone else around?"

"Um, Clint said, and shrugged, still looking awestruck. "Any of it, really. This is... it's... we haven't had much time."

They'd had a something over a month, and no, that really wasn’t much time. From what she'd seen last night, however, neither of them had problems being _used_ to the other.

"Haven't had much time together lately?" she hazarded, because maybe that was it-- Coulson'd been gone for three weeks with only one brief break. "Or haven’t had much time to play house?" And that was because she was just mean.

Clint smiled, though, looking up at her through his lashes, as if he knew exactly what she was doing.

"Oh, no, feels like we've always done that,” he said, and then continued before she could process _that_ and the matter-of-fact way he tossed it off, as if it weren’t a complete revolution of his life, “having sex, Nat. We've had barely any time to have sex; I only just found out what his toes taste like, for god's sake."

"Clint!" Natasha put down her coffee and glared at him. _And I am thoroughly chastised for my snark._ It only made his grin bigger, and he kept chattering while he put a cozy over the coffee press and poured the remainder of his cup into a Little Egg Harbor travel mug. 

"They taste real nice, by the way. He's got devastating feet. Well-formed, nice toes, pleasantly bony... wanna feed the chickens with me?" 

"Will it shut you up about Coulson's toes?" Because _anything_ was better than that. The last thing she needed was to have an unfortunate flashback to this conversation while Coulson was on comms and she was battling a supervillain and his army of mutant bats or something. 

"Maybe." Clint took her coffee from her hands-- and for anyone besides Clint, that would have been followed by a quick end to their life-- and poured it into an insulated LBI Garden Club tumbler-- Coulson seemed to have an endless stash of municipal mugs. "Seriously, come meet the chickens."

She went to meet the chickens.

The wind had picked up overnight, blowing across the yard like North Bar was barely an obstacle in its path, just a little bump before it met the sea again. Natasha retreated to the top step of the porch, huddling into her leather jacket and wrapping her hands more firmly around the mug. The coffee warmed her slowly inside, but her periphery remained cold. Clint, on the other hand, had straightened up and sighed in a lungful of the cold salty air, and a little half-smile appeared on his face.

_Perhaps the beard insulates him. I should ask Thor how that works._

Clint had always been adaptable; he could function practically anywhere comfortably, if given enough time to learn his surroundings. He had slipped around tree trunks deep in Bavarian forests, waded half at sea in golden grass of the Black Hills, walked the streets of Carcassone and Caracas, hung from skyscrapers in New York and Singapore. Here, on North Bar, Clint was already threaded deep into the rather patchy, pocked soil, with its tufts of drying grass and the last gasps of bindweed.

_Coulson’s clothes, his toes, his chicken, his life-- Clint, are you in love, or undercover?_

(That was perhaps unfair. Clint had moved into the space that Coulson had left him, but what was she to make of Coulson at the Tower, making eggs in the early morning and snarking at Steve? They'd each left empty spaces. If they each had also undertaken to fill those spaces until the other could come home, perhaps that was less roleplaying than a shared sense of responsibility.)

"Hey ladies," Clint said, as he unlatched the wire-covered door that led into the enclosed chicken run. The run itself was attached to a weatherbeaten little hut with a corrugated roof. As Clint shook feed out of its bag into a variety of plastic bowls, an avalanche of chickens tumbled out of the hut in a riot of colors and flying feathers, little agitated clucks and half-flaps. Clint greeted them all then disappeared into the hut, leaving them to feast and to chatter at each other. 

The run's door was still open. As Natasha watched, a small black chicken, dusty in the filtered sunlight, poked her head around the corner and stared straight at Natasha.

"Hi," Natasha said, carefully. 

The hen clucked back at her, then sashayed several chicken steps forward, before stopping to watch Natasha again. The pattern repeated itself twice more, and then the hen made a sudden dash for the stairs and was halfway up in a flurry of wings before Natasha could react.

They stared at each other.

_Cluck_ said the chicken. 

"Oh, I see you've met Tasha," said Clint. The double handfuls of eggs he was carrying were all that saved him.

Natasha was not going to miss breakfast just to prove a point.

**Two**

“... so Tony was just me being a jerk, since I was mad at Phil and Phil doesn’t name chickens. Doc Halliday over there I meant as a compliment, really. Um, I haven’t told her about it, though.” Clint’s voice floated in to Phil as he opened the back door and he paused, one hand on the worn latch and letting in cold air, to listen. 

Whatever Natasha said in response was lost to the wind. She was sitting on the porch, keeping half an eye on Tasha-the-hen, who was pecking around her, beak coming dangerously close at times to the seat of Natasha’s designer jeans. Clint was out in the yard, where the chickens had spread out for a morning ramble, and he was pointing each one out to Natasha like a proud parent.

_There goes any semblance of control I had over my poultry,_ Phil thought, and sighed.

“Okay, so, then when the girls were over one day, America-- you’ll meet her today, maybe, she’s kinda scarily badass, like I’d pit her against Steve badass, seriously, Nat-- anyway, she was grumbling about Kate’s Cousin Emily, and we ended up with each of the girls getting to name a chicken. So we’ve got Cousin Emily, and Wanda-- that was Kate’s contribution, and we _really_ need to keep that one under wraps-- and Skye named the skinny brownish one Miles. Miles the goddamned chicken. And the rest of them are Steve.”

_Of course they are_ , Phil thought, feeling absurdly warmed through, fondness spreading up from his toes. 

Natasha asked a question-- _why the hell is that_ , probably.

“Oh the Steves are all Phil’s fault,” Clint said.

“Slander,” Phil replied from the doorway, then slipped outside and closed it behind him. “Base slander. I asked you to name _one_ chicken, Clint. _One._ And I was… not entirely myself when I did it.”

Clint looked up and saw him, and perked up like Lucky when the food dish rattled. Natasha didn’t even turn as Phil came to stand beside her, though she did glance down at his feet. 

“No take-backs now, babe,” Clint told him. “It was the first time you’d wanted a chicken named, and you seemed real pissed off. I can’t help it if I got carried away. I figured if one chicken was good, several was probably better, since Phil might never want to name another. And anyway I was running out of names. So now they’re all Steve, until otherwise indicated.”

“In the future, I’ll remember to be more explicit when I’m wishing a chicken-namesake on someone.” Phil’d tried to use his very best Agent Coulson of SHIELD voice, but it was a lost cause; the dryness in it crumbled in the face of Clint’s happiness. Clint’d barely stopped glowing since the dance the previous night-- not even the realization that they’d narrowly missed Felix Blake invading the island had dampened his good humor. Whether it was having Phil back, or having Natasha at his side at last, or a combination of the two, Phil wasn’t sure.

He just wished he knew how Natasha saw them, in the clear light of morning. Whether they still had wooing to do, or whether a night’s reflection had already decided her.

(Was it too much to hope for that just by being here, North Bar and Clint were working their charms on her? Too egotistical of him to think that she’d see in him and Clint something to approve of? _Phil_ certainly thought what they’d created between them was worthy of praise.)

“Does that mean you’ve changed your mind on chicken-naming?” Clint asked, dragging Phil back to the present.

“No,” Phil told him, and went to sit by Natasha, on the grounds that there was no time like the present to start feeling her out. “How are you this morning?” he asked her, and she smiled up at him, a friendly, wry little grin. 

He had half a moment to feel like a deer caught in the headlights before she spoke.

“I could have done without knowing what your toes taste like, but otherwise I’m fine,” she said.

_Well great, I wasn’t using that dignity anyway,_ Phil thought, mortified. He knew his eyes were bugging out, knew a flush had just swept across his cheeks and all the way back to the curls of his ears, couldn’t help the reflexive head-duck and the way he bit his lip.

Clint had _told_ her? When the hell had his _toes_ come up for discussion? 

_At least I know he enjoyed that. If I don’t kill him, maybe he’ll do it again by way of apology._

Well, that wasn’t making the blush go down at _all_.

“I--” he tried, and shook his head. Even without looking he could tell Natasha was watching him like Tasha the chicken hunting a bug-- Clint’s name for the chicken had never seemed quite so apt. One wrong move, and he’d get swallowed whole. “I, um.” He looked up at Clint, hoping for a signal-- only to find Clint was crouched over, ass-up, in the chicken house. Natasha had timed her attack well.

_No wonder Clint loves her._

Phil sighed, and tilted his head back.

“Does he do this often?” he sighed, letting his mouth run away with him and hoping it would figure out what he was trying to think as it went. He felt, rather than saw, Natasha’s face darken. “I only ask so that I have time to get used to it.” 

After all-- he didn’t really know what Clint was like with people he trusted. Even if it seemed like forever, he’d only known Clint since mid-September. Never seen him with friends-- well, with friends he’d known more than a few weeks. Never seen him with Natasha. Happy Clint had a tendency to babble, he knew that. He just hadn’t realized that Clint might babble about _him_. Explicitly. To the Black Widow.

Who was still watching him closely, and he finally turned to meet her gaze. 

“All right,” she said, and an odd expression crossed her face, something cat-like leaving it, the smile underneath nearly shy. “Which of you is going to feed me, and which of you is going to tell me about your plan?”

\----

Nat had nearly mutinied when Clint had explained there would be no breakfast prior to morning chores-- _all_ the morning chores, and grumbled that he was turning into Steve, and did he _know_ he was turning into Steve? If he was going to do something like that, there were Avengers she would have preferred. Avengers who knew how breakfast worked.

“Yeah, I heard Sam got hijacked. I’ll have to apologize to him for that,” Clint had said, as he, Phil, and Natasha wandered up the hill towards the mansion. That had won him a far more searching look from Nat than he thought it deserved. He liked Sam, she knew he liked Sam-- he’d have been eternally grateful to Sam just for providing safe harbor and a good breakfast to Nat when she had been on the run and in danger-- and Clint hadn’t yet been there to watch over her.

“What?” he had said when Nat continued to stare at them, as they crunched over the browning grass. The wind blew her hair in a copper curtain across her face, but he didn’t need to see her entire expression to feel scrutinized. 

“Nothing,” she’d sighed, and pushed her hair back. “So you do still think about us from time to time.”

Clint turned to look at her then, and she stopped to let him. She’d drawn her jacket tightly around her against the wind, and her hair was flapping wildly, like she was going to fly away with a particularly stiff gust. That same wind curled pleasantly around his neck and ears, and he thought he caught the same faint whispers of waves and leaves and creaking limbs that had accompanied him on many walks. For a moment, he could have sworn all the bushes, all the trees, were bending closer to hear, prevailing wind direction be damned.

“Nat, I talk to Phil every day and he tells me about you. I just….” he broke off and sighed. _I just can’t think too hard about you all, or I’d never be able to face the day._ Here on North Bar, the ache was dulled, at least. 

“I’m not the only one who misses you,” she said, curling further into herself. It was unlike her to be so direct; was almost scary, in fact. “Steve’s jumpy. Does he tell you that? That it takes me and Sam and Bruce to try and keep Steve from cracking these days? Does Coulson tell you that Tony feels like he failed, but he’s not sure what at? That Thor keeps counting us, making sure we’re all actually there, when he thinks we’re not looking? Clint, you need to come back.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked, but asking the question was its own answer. The wind roared in his hears, and beyond him, Lucky bowled Phil over with a particularly enthusiastic leap. The cloud cover, patchy all morning, shifted just far enough to blind him with sunlight, pinwheels shooting in front of his eyes.

_You stop it,_ he thought, blinking until his gaze cleared. 

“Clint,” Natasha sighed, “did you stop to think about it at all? The commitment you’ve made here? And to everyone you’ve embroiled in this on LBI? What’s going to happen to them if your enemies find you there? What’s going to happen to them when you leave them?”

He fought not to snap at her. To yell that of _course_ he’d thought about it. It was why he’d tried to leave Phil, why he’d tried to keep Skye from getting mixed up with them-- they just _hadn’t given him a choice_. 

Clint winced-- of course he’d had a choice, and all along he’d been coming up to the butts and making his shots. Somehow, when he wasn’t looking, it had all snowballed and he’d collected half of LBI in one way or another, gotten himself all tangled up in everyone. Yet… what he’d really done, after all, was accept help, from people who wanted badly to give it to him. 

_Of course, in our line of work, accepting help just gets people killed._ That lesson had been etched into his bones long before he met Natalia Romanova. When he’d made the call-- to help her instead of offing her-- he’d known the burden he was placing on her. The guilt if they failed-- and the awful clawing gratitude if they succeeded.

Somehow, though, it hadn’t felt that way this time, except a bit around the edges. (Wanda Jackson. He could at least admit that the need to keep Wanda on their side was… inconvenient at best. And that he had Kate to thank for it not being any worse. Kate, at least, he didn’t mind being grateful to.) 

Phil would never have forgiven him for refusing the offer, after all. Nor Doc Halliday if he hadn’t come to her, let her help Phil. And as for his pack of accidental teenage not-so-sidekicks, they’d have killed him with eye-rolls if he’d tried to protect them. 

_Like I can’t take care of myself, boss,_ Skye’d told him, more than once.

And the past seemed so very far away just at the moment, as he stood next to the woman who’d stood by him for so long, propping him up even when she was crumbling himself, watching the wind whip the leaves from the scraggly beach plums and mottled sassafrass. The horizon out on the ocean was so soft it disappeared into sky; waves and clouds melting into each other. Nothing ever seemed so urgent on North Bar as it did when he left. 

“They’ll be fine,” he said finally, picking back up the conversational thread, “I’m just kind of a placeholder for Phil, Nat, since I accidentally got him mixed up with SHIELD. They’ll get Phil back.”

_Won’t they?_

Clint turned to look at Phil, just as he happened to look back at them. He was smiling into the shaft of sun, squinting, looking so much himself in the dark red plaid and jeans, yellow mutt cavorting at his feet. North Bar was such a part of him that he was the one who’d worn the path they were on, year after year. Clint couldn’t take him out of it, even if he wanted to.

_First things first: we’ve all got to survive this. It’s not like it’s more than a two-hour commute._

“Nat,” he said quietly, still watching Phil, “You are all right with this, right? You’re gonna help? I think… I just… things are gonna start happening fast now. I can feel it, can’t you? The shit’s about to go down, and…. We _need_ you.”

“Well of course you do, Clint,” she snapped, and he turned back to her, to that impatient little glare in her eyes that he knew from such long use. “My god, what would you do without me? Anyone could have recognized you at the dance. And if I’d known you were here I’d have tried not to be followed-- it’s a damn mess, and we’re going to fix it.” She looked towards Phil and back to him, heaving a sigh. “The three of us. Together.”

“Six of us,” he had said. “The girls’ll be here about eight to debrief, so anything you really want to grill us on beforehand, do it now.”

Phil must have sensed the change in their conversation, because he waited now for them to come up even with them, and smiled at Natasha quietly-- something more genuine than the carefully calculated little public smile Clint’d seen on him in company.

“There is _one_ thing I want to ask,” Natasha said, looking between them, and looking so very serious that Clint felt his spine snap straight and watched Phil snap to attention too. “Why in the world did you feel the need to call in the local girl scout troop for backup?”

“His started it,” Clint said, pointing to Phil-- only to find Phil pointing back at him.

“All his fault,” Phil was saying. 

\----

“I did want,” Phil said, as they re-entered the kitchen, shutting the cold wind out with a slam of the door, “to tell you-- both of you-- what Fury told me about Felix. Before the girls get here.” 

Nat looked up at him in the middle of seating herself at the table, and Clint blinked once, before he understood why.

“What you found out about Blake isn’t for Skye’s consumption?” he asked, pausing in the act of taking his anorak to the hook by the back door. 

“I don’t know,” Phil replied, removing the coat from his hands and hanging it gently next to his own. “That’s what I want your opinion on. I’m… biased.”

“We _aren’t_?” Clint found the words torn from him, and Phil shook his head.

“Differently biased. And you’re Avengers.” He held Clint’s gaze for a moment, pressing his point home, then shifted to do the same with Nat. “This concerns you… intimately.”

“It was never like that,” Nat told him, because Nat was apparently not through being a little shit. Clint lobbed a napkin at her, and she snatched it out of midair without looking, then folded it and set it down next to her coffee. “But as long as you’re making breakfast, too, I’m listening.”

“I’m making breakfast,” Clint said, and Phil glared at him, then looked back at Nat-- and Clint finally recognized that underneath the nonchalance he was nervous about this, nearly as nervous as he’d been when they’d sat out on the porch together plucking a chicken, and Phil had tried to keep Clint from spooking at the sound of his real name. “But you can do bacon. Bacon, right, Nat, not sausage?”

“Yes,” she said, but the look in her eyes told him she was refraining from the obvious, and that he should be very grateful to her.

In this, as in all things, he was. Phil was already moving for the freezer, and already talking, almost absent-mindedly, describing his entrance into Fury’s domain and how Fury’d taken finding out that he’d accidentally concealed Phil’s lover’s continuing existence from him for so long. Clint deliberately didn’t watch him, comfortable enough with their normal breakfast waltz that he could do it without looking. 

Eggs went from basket to pan, got whisked into a marigold froth with cream and butter. Natasha curled up into the padded bench and snugged her coffee in close to her chest, watching both of them. Bacon strips slid neatly onto a griddle, huddled in neat parallel lines, pricking up sweat. From the floor, Lucky heaved the sigh of a dog all too familiar with being denied tasty pork products. In Phil’s story, he walked them from a discussion about not-so-dead lovers and slowly up to the real point, where Fury had stopped him from walking out of the room and told him how Blake had come back to life, and why Phil was going to have to lie to the team of superheroes he was supposed to serve. The sun crept slowly back behind clouds, leaving the kitchen cold.

By the time he was finished, the bacon was off the griddle and draining on paper towels, and the eggs had firmed into soft buttercup curds against the black cast iron. Clint served portions onto three plates, while he tried to decide how to respond.

“Well,” Natasha said, leaning forward. “It’s not as if Clint and I didn’t know about the List.” She nodded at him, and Clint shrugged back. “And it’s not as if Fury’s wrong; it isn’t the kind of thing I really see Steve taking well to. And probably not Sam,” she continued with a frown. “Or Bruce. Who was… on the list. For a while.”

Phil turned from her to watch Clint, and he bit his lip. The eggs were gorgeous; just the right amount of stirring to produce big, nearly globular curds, fluffy as fucking cumulonimbus. He didn’t think he could go back to normal eggs, not without thinking about Phil-- and Tasha and Tony and Doc and all the Steves (today’s scramble was a Steve-Steve-Wanda-Doc joint effort). And eggs were all very well-- but eventually he was gonna have to come up with an answer, when all he really felt was a roil of emotions, and he wasn’t sure why he was holding them so carefully in check, not around these two.

Except that Phil’d admitted bias already, and Clint felt he had to compensate somehow.

“That doesn’t explain why not tell you or me, Nat,” he said softly, finally, hoping could keep the thread of conversation from tangling on him if he payed it out slowly enough. He gave her a plate, then continued. “Like you said-- we know about the list. And we are-- we were-- Level 7s. And… friends. We’d been friends.”

“Fury can’t help but compartmentalize, Clint,” Nat said, accepting a fork and looking down, and Clint winced. Even so long after, the hours she’d thought Nick Fury was dead still haunted her. Clint, who hadn’t wandered into the mess until after she and Steve had fled, who’d been called in by Maria Hill to watch the Director’s recovery while she contacted Stark to get JARVIS’s help, then went to the rescue while Captain America was being taken down in public by a STRIKE team, had far fewer hours to mourn than Nat had endured. And he didn’t expect to know everything-- he wasn’t always sure about Nat. 

“Yeah but he doesn’t do it without reason, Nat,” he replied. “I dunno-- I just… it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like enough. I could see if he was keeping Blake in reserve ‘cause he wasn’t sure yet what Tony’s poking was gonna reveal, who he could trust in the organization, right? But if that were it, wouldn’t he bring the guy back? I mean officially back? ‘Cause eventually something like this was gonna happen. Hell, I’m shocked it hasn’t yet, if he hasn-- Phil?”

Phil was busy turning pale and muttering under his breath.

“The agent on the Hall case,” he said, and he looked up at them both, “Fury said I’d approve of who he was, if I knew.”

Clint suddenly didn’t feel at all hungry. 

“Well it’d be right up Blake’s alley,” he said softly, “trying to find a kidnapped scientist. So. Um.”

“So what?” Nat asked, but not as if she were mocking him. Phil shook his head. 

“Feels like it ought to mean _something._ ”

“This whole Blake _thing_ feels like it ought to,” Nat agreed, and gestured him to sit down. Phil did, sliding in the other side of the bench and setting his plate and coffee down. Clint got lost for a minute, watching them settle in, two cats negotiating territory in the sunny patch. The wind, or the distraction of the story, had ruffled Nat sufficiently that she’d stopped looking out of place. With her elbows on the table and an abstracted frown on her face, she and Phil were near matches.

“Could just be Fury telling him about you, though, that you’d been asking. And him getting nervous,” Clint said, unwilling to join them just for a moment longer, because seeing them there was settling something inside him.

“Possibly,” Nat rolled the thought and the word around on her tongue. “As for Hall-- Blake would have taken it personally. Not finding him, and him going supervillain. That might be why he showed up in New York so soon after we took down Graviton.”

“He used to work with superheros,” Phil said quietly, and Nat looked over at him. Whatever was in her face, Clint didn’t think it was actually meant for him-- he was stunned at how deeply it hit him, that she and Phil were doing the connect-the-dots-thing, the don’t-need-words thing, together. He wanted to squeeze them both. 

“He did,” she agreed.

“It’s a hard thing to give up,” Phil said softly, still watching her, “I imagine. And to die, and come back, and not be able to tell them? And then… to fail them.”

“How the hell did he do that?” Clint asked.

“He didn’t find Hall,” Nat said. “And Hall broke Sam’s leg. Nearly took down Thor. Blake always liked Thor, though I’m not sure how mutual the feeling was. You know what still bothers me? Clint-- come here and eat with us.”

“That still bothers you?” Clint laughed, and came over, hesitating a moment before setting his place between them. Phil made to get up, but Clint grinned and slipped under the table before he could. He brushed two sets of legs on his way up, and nearly caught his shoulders as he slithered into place on the back bench. 

And then there he was, centered between his two best people, with good coffee and good food in front of him, and the world was an okay place to be. 

“No,” Nat said, “what bothers me is that Fury doesn’t usually send people to tropical islands to recover. It would keep Blake off the grid, yes, but SHIELD has plenty of facilities to do that. Tahiti. He said Tahiti?”

“Yes,” Phil said. “Why?”

“Hrmph. Because it _should_ mean something. And it doesn’t. I don’t like when it doesn’t.” Nat stabbed at her eggs viciously, in counterpoint to her annoyance.

“Well,” Phil said, “perhaps I should feel Melinda out on that one. It’d be natural for me to ask her about Blake. Anything else for the good of the order before Skye gets--”

“Too late, Skye’s here,” Skye said, as she let herself into the kitchen, kicking a chicken out who was trying to rush past her feet. “And I hope you saved me breakfast. I waited for Kate and America a while, but they never showed. Didn’t have time to grab anything to eat. And g’morning, by the way, boss’n’boss-- and Black Widow.”

Natasha had put down her fork and was looking at Skye carefully, with a weird little quirk to her lips, not really a smile but something between resigned and wry.

“Of course,” she said, addressing Skye. “You were the one who spotted me.”

“Yeah,” Skye agreed, blushing-- which caught Clint completely by surprise. “It was the pot pies. Well. No, really, it was the boats.”

“The boats?” Phil asked, and Skye pointed at Clint.

“He’s _great_ with boats,” she said. And just like that, Nat burst out laughing, something a little helpless and mostly sunny and that clearly startled Phil, like he’d never heard it from her before. Clint wasn’t sure why; Nat laughed, when she was at home. At least, she did with him. 

“So seriously: breakfast.” Skye said. “And then talk. Lots.”

**Three**

Despite-- or perhaps because of-- the unexpected presence of the Black Widow in the kitchen, Skye had taken her time over her eggs and bacon, consuming them with a fervor usually reserved for the recently-starved, alternating forkfuls with huge sips from the mug of coffee in her other hand. Paying attention to her breakfast had been infinitely preferable to thinking past the moment.

Finally, though, she was done, and facts had to be faced. Skye settled back against her side of the bench, tucked up against the porch door, and cuddled her jacket around her to combat the draft. Clint brought the french press-- filled now with its fourth batch of coffee-- over and placed it in the middle of the table, in what had early on become their unofficial signal that it was time to start the morning check-in. He sat down next to Phil.

Skye flipped open her laptop and started, giving what she thought was a pretty decent agenda for the morning: updates from Phil’s visit with Fury, updates from her on the Ian Quinn front, anything their visiting Avenger friend wanted to share (here, she cast a sidelong glance at the Black Widow, who presented her with a blank face), analysis, next steps, any new business, and adjournment to the chicken yard to go say hi to the flock.

She had _not_ been listening to Kate sit in the back booth at the Blue Peter and brush up on her Robert’s Rules with Doc Halliday, while America performed the world’s slowest table-set nearby, no not at all. And if she had, certainly none of it had rubbed off.

It was all for nothing, unfortunately. The Black Widow thanked her-- so politely that Skye was sure she was about to be invited home and eaten-- and promptly threw her neat little agenda out the window.

“About that,” the Widow said, “we already have a discussion on the table, Skye. You--” she pointed at Phil-- “were going to explain how you ended up with surveillance equipment of Ian Quinn’s.” She was holding Phil’s gaze now, her expression chilly as the wind still wailing outside the cottage. Skye fought the dueling urges to throw herself in front of that gaze to protect him, and to escape while she still could.

“They were in some crates that washed off Quinn’s yacht with me,” Clint said, gentling the Widow down. “Not that either Phil or I knew what we had at all, till Skye here showed up in the bunker with your chicken, poking at them.”

_Thank you so much, boss._ Skye thought, wincing, _That’s all I needed. Really, sincerely, thanks._

The Black Widow stared her down, head tilted just so-- and no, that was _not_ okay. Natasha Romanov, spy, assassin, and superhero, was looking at her the exact same way Tasha the hen had been during Skye’s interrogation that first night in the bunker. Some things were just not meant to happen in this world, and things that made her question the transference of personality from human to chicken through the sheer power of naming were among them. Hell-- if Chicken Tasha hadn’t been at her feet when she’d seen the Black Widow this morning, Skye would have started to wonder if she wasn’t a shapeshifter after all.

“Skye?” Phil said quietly, and Skye turned to look at him, sure her face was falling into an expression of pleading horror.

_Oh for god’s sake, are they waiting for_ me _to explain it? I’m not the one who climbed onto that yacht and got caught! I’m not the guy who found the crates-- why me? All I did was hack into Quinn’s company database a little and stalk him from one cost to another. It’s not fair._

Phil raised an eyebrow at her, like he knew exactly what she was thinking, like he was about to bust out a _life’s not fair, sweetheart,_ and Skye started, if only to cut that off. 

She explained about the crates and Quinn-- and then circled back to the Rising Tide and how she’d found the yacht in the first place, how they’d realized it wasn’t what was on it but where it went that was important. She’d had America and Kate searching the Jersey Shore, first identifying where the yacht _wasn’t_ when it was supposed to be, and where the signal broke off and went false. 

“That… fits,” the Black Widow told them all, when Skye wound down. “I visited Quinn on his yacht, sometime after SHIELD finished with him. It was entirely clean. Not a trace of Clint to be found. Not a trace of _anything_. My trackers disappeared before he next set sail.”

“Uhuh,” Clint replied, leaning forward, “so clean it seemed really dirty, is what you’re saying?”

“Precisely,” she smiled at him gently. “Also there was new decking all along the port side of the yacht. You must have been a messy visitor.”

“I hope so,” Clint said. “Can’t remember much of it myself.” He waved away the frown that drew across the Widow’s lips, and continued: “Anyway, Quinn’s still up to something, obviously. Just really hard to narrow down what exactly.”

Skye closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, trying to bring oxygen up through the flooring and her toes and into her lungs. 

“I think I have an idea,” she said, resigning herself to being the center of attention a little longer. “I just now thought of it, but I think it’s good.” Her next step, she told them, watching Clint and Phil at the same time as the Widow, was going to be to identify locations of interest along the shoreline that the yacht could have reached during the time the false transceiver signals were active-- and whether any of them pinged on SHIELD’s database.

“Sensible,” said the Widow, and Skye felt her lungs deflate with massive relief. It lasted all of ten seconds, before the Widow shifted next to her and leaned forward again. 

“One question,” she said, all calm and friendly-like, like she was still talking to Skye about the friggin’ pot pies. “How do you plan to get access to SHIELD’s database?

Fuck any resemblance to chickens. A spider was a spider was a spider, and Skye’d just walked smack into a web. She looked to Clint for help, trying to make her eyes big and round and pleading as Lucky looking for scraps.

She received a snort for her trouble, and a little “after you” sort of wave. 

And then the jerk poked at Phil and said mumbled something about dishes, and the two of them actually got up from the table (with a little more brushing of shoulders and hips than was probably strictly necessary) and _left her all alone with the Black Widow_ while they beat a retreat to the sink.

Skye tried to glare at them, but they were too busy running dishwater and blatantly ignoring her pleas for assistance to notice.

_Fuck you, this was all your idea, boss. Mostly. Mostly your idea. Kind of. Shit._

There was nothing to be done but explain, so Skye did. She started with the data she’d pulled from SHIELD, the realization that Tony Stark had hacked it all before her, and how she’d finally figured out that they needed to get into SHIELD itself to get the right information-- really, pretty much everything short of sending Phil into the lions’ den armed with nothing but a trojan lighthouse, a neatly-pressed suit, and a resume.

“Ah,” the Widow said, when Skye’d finally finished and was gulping coffee, feeling like she’d been flattened by a steamroller, “I knew there was more than either of you had bothered to explain.” She glared at Phil and Clint impartially.

“We’d have gotten around to it,” Clint said, picking up a bowl and rubbing at it vigorously with his towel, like if he didn’t concentrate on it and _only_ it the thing would vanish from reality. Natasha rolled her eyes.

“I’m sure-- in another ten years. What happened next? Or is that why you came to SHIELD?” she asked, turning to Phil, “to find and steal the data Skye needed?” 

He nodded and-- mercifully-- took up the thread, leaning back against the counter and crossing his arms, creating dark marks where the suds on his forearms leaked into his shirt. Skye hunched over her laptop, pretending to work, and tried not to tremble too noticeably in the aftermath. She probably wasn’t fooling anyone.

“That’s why I came to SHIELD,” Phil said, “on an informational interview with an old friend-- and unexpectedly got hijacked by Marcus-- by Director Fury-- who twisted my arm until I agreed to be your SHIELD liaison. _That_ was not anywhere in our plan; I just couldn’t think of a safe way to say no. We had to scramble on all fronts.” He glanced at Clint with a twist of a smile, and Skye snorted. Understatement of the millenium, there. 

“I would never have guessed,” the Black Widow told him dryly, and Clint beamed at her like it was some kind of compliment. 

_Hell, maybe it is, too-- that was some epic flying by the seats of our pants there, for a while. Like, America Chavez-style epic._

“So did you get your data?” 

It took a moment for Skye to realize that she was being addressed, and she closed her eyes and took a swallow of coffee. _Why the hell am I the one doing all the talking? I’m not the superhero here, and I’m not the crazy guy who infiltrated the Avengers either. Did everyone else say ‘not it’ while I wasn’t paying attention?_

“Mostly, yeah,” she said, resigning herself to a horrible case of laryngitis in the morning. “Fat lot of good it’s done us so far.”

Of course, the Black Widow made her explain _that,_ too. At least that was short-- yeah, she’d gotten most of the data, but they hadn’t found any one consistent person at all the same bases at Clint at the same time. Could so easily be _more_ than one person trying to frame Clint, of course, but she’d have to have a place or name to start with, before it’d be practical to test the theory. 

As Skye finished, Clint dried his last dish, rubbing it so vehemently the darn thing squeaked. He put it back in the cupboard while Phil pulled the plug on the sink. The loud gulp and almost obscene gurgle of the water down the drain shocked Skye out of the daze she’d fallen into during her report.

She glanced up at the clock on the wall, and grunted in surprise. Nine o’clock. She’d been talking for an _hour_. A whole entire goddamn hour with the Black Widow sitting there staring at her with hen-sharp eyes and her two bosses doing the damned dishes like kitchen interrogations were a daily occurrence. (There was an outside possibility that they _were_ , with the Avengers. In which case Phil had acclimated to his temporary role with scary speed.) 

“Where are Kate and America? They’re not usually this late,” Clint asked Skye, and she shrugged.

“Dunno. Kate told me last night I’d better come on my own. Figured they were, um,” she stopped herself just before _flying in later_ popped out of her mouth, “getting their own ride,” Skye finished, because America probably didn’t want just anyone knowing what she could do.

(Hell, Skye wasn’t entirely sure _she_ was supposed to know America could _fly_ , but neither of them were particularly discreet, honestly, and not like America could get everywhere she got to on her feet alone. It wasn’t even the freakiest thing Skye’d ever seen-- so the girl could punch like a heavyweight champion and fly a bit, so what? All bonuses in Skye’s book, and good catch, _Bishop_. Skye’d never really wanted superpowers, herself, but it was cool to see in someone else.)

“Have you tried texting them this morning?” Clint asked her, as if he were incapable of doing it himself, and Skye snorted. He had and she had kind of fallen into a clear delineation of duties over the course of the weeks it’d been just them running the North Bar side of the operation. She contacted Kate and America when it was something like this-- a debrief or a scouting mission or whatever, and he texted Kate when it was about arrows. 

And when Hawkeye was worried about his young apprentice, but didn’t want her to know, he hounded Skye, who asked America.

It would have been cute if it hadn’t been even more work for her on top of everything else.

“Just a quick reminder, yeah, but I didn’t hear anything,” Skye told him.

“I don’t think you will,” Phil said, and he removed her plate from the table, stacking it on top of the others as he stood. “Ms. Bishop told me something-- Clint, are you sniggering?”

Clint was sniggering. Clint, in fact, had his forehead pressed against a convenient cabinet and was headed straight for uncontrollable laughter.

“Phil… did you just call Kate ‘Ms. Bishop’?”

“Perhaps,” Phil said, and Skye watched his lips start to curl into a smile. “Isn’t she?”

“You called her that to her face last night, didn’t you?” 

Phil nodded, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Skye realized she knew just how he would have said it, too, all smug and suit-y, pulling out his very best Agent Coulson, Parliamentarian demeanor, and she bit her lip.

Oh, _poor_ Kate.

“I’m not above petty revenge,” he said at last, and Clint leaned back, lolled his head against the bench, and grinned up at him.

“She must have _loved_ that. You’re lucky she didn’t haul off and actually hit you this time.”

“It was a near run thing.” Phil was slowly turning into Boss now, his frown pulling Clint back from the edge of laughter. “She accused me of tattling on her to her father.”

“She what?” Clint said, sobering up quickly, and the Black Widow-- _Natasha_ \-- straightened up, catching something of his mood. 

“Apparently,” Phil said, as he sat back down at the table with a fresh mug of coffee, “someone carried tales to her father about her practicing archery here on North Bar. I suspect that’s why she’s not here today; he was coming down to see her. She was… nervous… about the meeting.”

_Nervous_ , Skye thought, would hardly cover it, not from the little Kate had let slip about Derek Bishop, nor the gossip she’d picked up around LBI about the absentee father and landlord. Their relationship seemed like something out of a soap opera or a bad novel-- or maybe that was just normal for rich people. God knew Skye didn’t have much in the way of personal experience to draw on.

“Practicing archery?” the Widow asked, breaking in and looking between the three of them. “Why would he care?”

“You remember the Met Gala thing, just after I, um, went overboard?” Clint asked her, and she nodded.

“Vaguely. We were a little bit distracted at the time. Once we knew it wasn’t you, it just seemed,” the Widow suddenly seemed to find her coffee cup intensely interesting, “like a stunt of some sort, frankly. One in very poor taste.” She was still staring at the scripted _A Gift From Ship Bottom, NJ_ on the side of the mug as if it held the secrets of the universe.

“You needed to pay more attention, Nat,” Clint told her, and poked her briefly on the shoulder, “because that girl shoots better’n anyone I’ve seen. Except _maybe_ me. No one does that for a stunt. That was Kate. And that’s why her Daddy sent her here, to keep her nose out of trouble. Keep her from turning herself into Hawkeye.”

“That seems to have worked out very well for him,” Natasha said dryly, and Skye snorted.

“So you’re saying we’re gonna need a contingency plan for getting _that_ Hawkeye out of trouble, too, boss?” she asked, concentrating on Phil, and got his tiny little amused smile as a reward. 

“If America can’t manage it for her, I suppose. Let’s burn that bridge when we come to it. For the moment, let’s concentrate on the fact that I am _not_ , nor have I ever been, a tattletale. Which means someone else _is_. And we think,” he said, “unfortunately, that it has to be Agent Triplett.”

“Aw, Triplett, no,” Skye found herself sighing, dismayed. But he was so _cute._ He’d practically been the highlight of her week, once she’d stopped being terrified he was going to discover Clint and their secret. It couldn’t be _all_ bad, she’d figured, this sneaking around they were doing, not if it brought her into contact with that tall, gorgeous, hunk of a SHIELD agent, with his twinkle and his gracious manners, who waited so politely while she gathered things for Phil. 

Next to her, the Black Widow appeared to be having a similar reaction; at least, her face had dissolved into something very nearly human as disappointment set in. _Least I know I’m not the only one who likes his smile._

“ _Antoine Triplett?_ ” the Widow asked, in a voice that clearly said _that sweet hunk of a man_. “Why him?” 

Phil gestured to Skye, and she very nearly asked _what do you want from me?_ before catching on. 

_The exposition fairy rides again, huh? Yee-haw._

She explained their encounter with Antoine Triplett briefly to Natasha-- ‘cause if she was gonna be so damn human as to go a little gooey over the thought that a cute guy with muttonchops to die for might also be a lying, betraying jerk, she clearly was “Natasha,” and not “the Black Widow” after all,

“Well,” Natasha said at last, “It fits. At least, there don’t seem to be many other options. It may not be him directly, though-- why would he be in contact with Bishop?”

“I’m not sure,” Phil said quietly, “and you’re right, he might have told someone else, instead, who’s in contact with Bishop. No, what really worries me is that Bishop is very tight with Ian Quinn; tight enough that I was sure he was sizing me up at Stark’s party.”

“This is it, then, isn’t it?” Clint perked up. “We might _finally_ have our SHIELD connection to Ian Quinn? Derek Bishop and Antoine Triplett?”

It gives me something to search for, anyway,” Skye allowed, drawing it out. She didn’t want to think of Antoine Triplett as being part of the conspiracy. He seemed entirely too nice, too… sparkly. _But then, what are our other options? Clint laid them out on the playground once-- his friends, his lovers, his teammates. And god I want something concrete to go off of for once._ “I’ll send both their names through the SHIELD data and through Quinn’s files. And start seeing if Bishop keeps his day planner online-- gonna take a while, though.”

“You do that,” Natasha told her, and she was pretty much back to mission-mode. “I think you’ll find a fair amount, actually.” Now that Skye’d seen under her mask, though, the cool detachment didn’t bother her so much. _That’s what Clint sees in her-- same damn thing Phil does when he’s got too many things on his mind, just shuts his face down._

“Why’s that?” Clint asked, and Natasha glanced at Phil before turning back to him.

“He’s been working with Victoria Hand off and on ever since the Chitauri Invasion. That’s why he was her second at the Tower when Phil was in quarantine. And… the Avengers haven’t had a lot of trust in Hand. Tony, I know dug as deeply into her files as he possibly could-- one of many reasons they have such a spectacular working relationship. She was clean, so far as we knew at the time. But the work you and Skye have done-- it makes it worth another look. Perhaps a combination-- herself, and Triplett. And while we’re at it,” she frowned at Clint, “describe this Jawbones you said had come after the crates.”

“Tall, pale, kinda broody, definitely skulky, square jaw… I mean the name kinda says it all, Nat,” Clint told her, and Skye found herself sinking under a wave of icy realization. 

“Hey, I saw him a few days ago, around Gansett Light,” she said. 

He’d been one of the people to come and go in the general rush that had attended the preparations for last night’s fundraiser. Didn’t say much, just sat and drank coffee and read a book. Kind of like the Black Widow herself, come to think of it. Determinedly uninterested in gossip or anything else.  
He’d stuck in her memory mostly because he was tall and dark-- well, not Triplett-dark, but certainly dark-haired-- and slim in just the style she most liked to ogle. (Less butt, and pity about the complete lack of personality, but she hadn’t been trying to date him or anything, just enjoy the view.) 

_How many fucking spies have I missed? Just how the hell swamped are we?_

“Yes,” Natasha said, pulling Skye back to full attention, “it would fit. My… contact… said he saw several other spies down here. He thought at least one of them was a SHIELD agent. Your Jawbones fits the description he gave me, but he didn’t have a name.” 

“If only we could just do a SHIELD image search by jawline,” Clint grumped. 

“Maybe we can.” Skye let the idea roll out of her mouth without thinking, and watched it unspool as she spoke. Yeah, it had promise. “I bet we’ve got surveillance video of him at the Blue Peter. I could try an image match search with SHIELD’s HR badge images. I’ll need to get back to the Peter before I do that. See if he matches anyone.” 

If he matched, they had a second connection between Quinn and SHIELD. Triplett, Bishop, Hand, Jawbones… finally-- finally!-- threads to pull. Skye felt better than she had in weeks.

Better, in fact, than she had felt since Phil had gone to New York and entirely failed to come back in his usual prompt fashion. She bit her lip to keep from beaming her gratitude at him, for finally coming home. Properly.

He was looking a little stunned himself, as was Clint. 

_Oh my god, actual progress!_ The thought went zipping between them, she saw it in their eyes.

And once they pulled the right thread, finally, once the conspiracy started to unravel in their laps, they could… what?

_What_ can _we do? Just walk up to Tony Stark and Captain America and Director Fury with the evidence and say ‘here’? They’re never going to believe us._

Ah, but they had the Black Widow on their side now. She was watching them all with a little smile, looking entirely at home curled up in her corner of the window seat, and whenever her eyes caught Clint’s, the smile tugged up, drawn by the light in her eyes. _She’s been just as desperate as we were._

Natasha Romanov was a damn good ace to have up their sleeve. Surely, between her and Phil, surely they _could_ just do that. Just say “here” and then wait for everything to get taken care of from there.

Hell, they just might make it yet.

 

**Four**

Morning had, most unfortunately, arrived at the Trashcan. Hazy light crept over the comforter and spread in a slow ooze all over the bed, seeping in underneath Kate’s eyelids and forcing her into wakefulness. With it came sounds from downstairs that Kate was less than familiar with, at least before about eleven am-- Cousin Emily’s voice (increasing and then receding in a nasal dopplerized whine), the thump of the doors, scrape of chairs, and the low murmur of a male voice, deep and a little whiny at the end.

Dad. Right. (Funny how quickly you could forget how even people close to you could sound-- it’d only been a month, maybe closer to two, since she’d last talked to him.)

He was early.

Fuck.

Kate briefly contemplated smothering herself with her own pillow, before deciding that it was more dramatically satisfying than actually useful as a gesture. 

She got up, instead.

_Go downstairs, and get it over with, or wait up here and see if he’ll come on_ my _turf?_ Kate drifted over to the balcony as she thought about it, and stopped just short of the balcony doors.

She hadn’t bothered to curtain them last night-- not like anyone short of, like, someone on a ship would have a view into them, and then only with a good set of binoculars. Only America was likely to enter from _that_ direction. (Well, okay, she bet Clint could have, or the Black Widow she’d met so briefly last night. But she was past the age where she imagined superheroes appearing at her window to invite her off on an adventure. Reality was… far more complicated.)

It’d been past midnight when Kate and Emily had gotten home, and Kate had gone docily up to bed, closed the door behind her with a sigh and thumped heavily down on the bed, making the bedsprings squeak. She’d laid there for a moment, waiting to make sure Emily’d retreated, then bounced right off the bed and raced to open the balcony doors to let America in, because if it was her last night, then… if it was her last night here then frankly she was going to spend it with America in her bed. 

After, America had stayed till Kate was mostly asleep, drugged with endorphins and the soft warm scent of America under her nose. Then, she’d shifted, her smooth body rolling out of the bed, leaving Kate vaguely chilled but too tired to protest. She’d paused, once, in the door out to the balcony, a black shadow backlit by stars and the reflection of the moon off the ocean. When she’d gone out, the closing door had snicked like the seal on an airlock. 

Kate wanted to imagine America here in the doorway now, or down below the dock, watching her from the shadows. America wasn’t there, of course, but a zippy little tender was, sleek and white with red racing stripes-- definitely not something her father would own.

She raised her eyes to the horizon, a yacht bobbed.

So in the end, there’d been no choice-- she wasn’t letting the enemy come beard her in her own bedroom. Kate pressed her feet into fuzzy slippers, pushed her hair back from her eyes, slumped down into a sullen-teenager-half-awake frown, and padded down the glass staircase, placing each foot carefully. The last thing she needed right now was to slip.

Derek Bishop was waiting for her at the bottom, sitting in a chair in the open steel-and-leather lounge that stretched out to the left of the staircase, and he was looking up at her. So was another man. They were wearing nearly identical clothing; soft cashmere sweaters, heavy watches, custom Italian boat shoes. It wasn’t her Dad’s fault that it made him look like some refugee from a yacht rock cover, but it made the other guy look like he’d stepped right out of GQ. 

“Morning,” Kate had said, when it became clear that her father was waiting for her to speak first. She supposed she could have made a Thing about it, waiting to see how long it’d take him to break and say hello to her if she didn’t do it first-- but god that seemed like so much work.

“Kate,” her Dad frowned, “about time you were up. You knew I was coming.”

_About time I was up? Since when’ve you bothered with your family before dinner time, Dad?_

“Long night last night. With Emily,” Kate supplied, slurring it a little. “And Wanda Jackson. And… everyone.” She waved vaguely as she took the last step, then sat down on it, so that her Dad had to loom over her if he wanted to talk to her.

Fuckit all, she was _tired_ , and she supposed she could have gone on standing on the stairs, trying to command the high ground, but here… well, here her Dad came, looming as expected, only he looked so funny and turtle-like from this angle, his awful goatee smothering any vestige of neck he might have had left.

“Wanda Jackson?” he asked her, “who’s she?”

“Oh,” Kate yawned, “Head of the Pres’rvation Society. And, like, DAR and all that. On her mama’s side. Mama’s mama’s. ‘S important to know that part. Daddy was a millionaire from… St. Kitt’s? Someplace. She told me, I’m sure--”

“But why the hell did she want _you_ around?” he asked her, clearly puzzled. The other man was still sitting there, watching them both benignly, before turning his gaze back to the bloody mary in his hand. 

“‘Cause no one else on this forsaken island both knows parliamentary procedure _and_ can trace ancestry back to Plymouth Rock. Mom’s Dad. Remember? Anyway, Wanda wants me.”

And if Dad hadn’t already, he was gonna go look Wanda Jackson up and find out her nephew was kinda big in real estate over in Manhattan-- kinda sorta really nearly as big a name as Dad himself. It was the first shot in Kate’s arsenal, just the opening salvo, and she wasn’t afraid to set off the rest-- especially since it looked increasingly like Dad aimed to have this out right where they were, with his friend watching.

Kate leaned over, the better to see past her father, and addressed the yachting guy.

“I’m Kate,” she said. He nodded back, and his teeth gleamed white and even.

“Ian Quinn,” he replied. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“All of it bad, I’m sure.” Her mouth, clearly, was on autopilot, since her brain’d frozen at the name.

_I’ve only been chasing your goddamn yacht all over for the last few days, and here you are moored on my dock._

“Kate,” her father snapped, and she re-focused her attention. “Ian and I will be staying here for a few days, while we conduct a couple of transactions. I would have hoped to find you looking a _little_ less debauched.”

And aw _fuck_. Aw _no_ no no. This was worse than threats of Sweetbriar. Holy fuck this was worse than any punishment she could have thought up on her own-- even threatening Billy and Teddy and Eli with trespassing for using the warehouse, something Kate’d dreamed about in nightmares that night. 

Because her Dad could do whatever the hell he wanted, but as soon as he left, Kate’d have free reign of the Trashcan back, wouldn’t she?

And she had a girlfriend who could fly. In case she got stuck at Sweetbriar, or had to warn her friends.

But Dad here, _with_ Quinn? She was stuck, well and truly hobbled.

Kate didn’t even hear her father begin to enumerate her many recent failings, how disappointed he was to hear about her using that fucking toy bow, playing like she was still some fairy tale princess. How she was forgetting that only his influence had kept her out of jail. How he wouldn’t have his pride and his reputation ruined because she was determined to pout her way through life, punctuating it with fits of violence. 

She didn’t bother to ask how he’d known-- there was Agent Triplett, after all. She was pretty sure Phil Coulson had called that one correctly, last night. 

“What I never want to see, Kate, is you running about with a… a hairy middle-aged handyman with probable PTSD, no money, and a reputation as a loner-- he’s practically Ted Kaczynski.”

“Who?” Kate asked him, mostly just to see him wince. (Kaczynski was the guy with the bombs, right? Not the guy with the cult?)

“Damnit, Kate, that’s what I mean. I sheltered you too much. It’s _you_ I’m worried about. Any number of bad things that could happen to you, alone on that island, and no one would ever find out.”  
“I think you’re confusing Phil and Frank,” Kate told him, probably the first uncalculated words that had passed her mouth all morning. “Phil’s the middle-aged scruffy guy. But I haven’t been hanging out with _him_. I’ve been hanging out with Frank. He’s got better arms.”

“The difference in arms is immaterial, Kate,” Derek Bishop snapped at her, stepping right up to her and attempting to meet her eyes. Since she was staring at his kneecaps, the attempt failed. He sighed, an explosive, impatient sound, and retreated. _Yeah you wouldn’t want to bend yourself to my level, would you?_ “What’s material is that this is a completely inappropriate, dangerous relationship for you, young lady. And if you continue with it, I may have to take steps.”

“ _What_ steps?” she hissed back. “I’m over eighteen, I’m legal. You can’t charge him with anything.” 

Anyway, she was so _not_ sleeping with Clint Barton,good _god_ \-- but why confuse things further by protesting?

“No. And if I bring you back to New York, you’ll just cause some other big mess I’ll have to clean up before it hits the New York Post, I’m sure. You’ve already hit the Met; I imagine next time will be the Empire State Building or Times Square, or whatever other public landmark you can find, just for variety?”

_What faith you have in me, Dad._

“So it’s Sweetbriar, huh?” she asked, just to get it over with.

“No,” said Derek Bishop, “that doesn’t seem likely to deter your behavior sufficiently. You _are_ eighteen, as you reminded me. You might just leave without telling me. No, Kate, I’d cut you off without a cent, but I’m guessing you’d just run straight to North Bar and move in with that sleezeball.” 

_Takes one to know one_ she thought, grumpily.

“So what then?” she asked, and he smiled-- or she thought he did. From her vantage point on the floor it was hard to differentiate smile from leer.

“I’m glad you asked. If you set a _foot_ out of line, young lady, if I so much as hear you stepped on North Bar, saw Frank Barney for a minute, or left this house without my permission-- whether I’m here or whether you have to submit the request by text-- then I will call the police, in New York, and tell them there are squatters in a certain warehouse I own. You might find those squatters familiar, Kate. There are three of them, and I think you know them all. Some of them would… deal very badly with being arrested, I’m sure. Do you hear me?”

And fuck it all there it was, then-- what she’d literally dreamed about. 

Now that it was out in the open, _behave or your friends get it_ , she realized she only felt flat.

Downright exhausted, even.

“I hear you,” she told her father.

“What the hell is the attraction, anyway,” he snapped at her after a minute. “If you really wanted to use your damned bow, there’s plenty of beach here. Is it the arms? How did he get you out there?”

Kate decided truth was probably the easiest course, and shrugged her shoulders. “He knew how to use a bow. He offered to let me shoot. He thinks I’m good at it. And sometimes I get to name his chickens. Named one after Cousin Emily.”

“I don’t give a fuck about your cousin Emily, and any chickens named after her,” Derek Bishop roared, and Kate granted herself the moral victory.

Oh, he poked about at the subject of Frank a bit more, and even Ian Quinn interjected with a couple questions, but Kate sparred with only half her attention.

_He’s not even interested in_ me _, he’s really just interested in finding out what’s up on North Bar._

Finally, she was able to escape up the stairs, an energy drink in hand in lieu of breakfast. Each step up felt more like retreating into Rapunzel’s tower, and she wondered how fast she could grow her hair out. _Except Mr. Jailer down there’d check to make sure I couldn’t reach the ground with it._

America was waiting for her when she got back to her room. The balcony door was open just a crack, making the curtains next to it billow gently in the draft. That she couldn’t _see_ America made next to no difference-- even without the hint of the curtains, she’d have known America was there. Her bedroom was somehow warmer and more comforting than when she’d left it.

Kate put down her drink and moved slowly to the closet. All inside was still.

She opened the door, eyes roaming the clothing spread about the rods, which spanned three sides of the little room. So few clothes for such a large closet; she never had taken up all the space her Dad had thought proper for her. 

America was perched on top of the low dresser on the back wall, her legs crossed, watching her with those dark eyes.

Kate shut the door carefully behind her and slumped to the floor, closing her eyes.

Rustling indicated America was getting up, and then her jean-clad ass slid down the door until it was flat on the ground next to Kate. It wasn’t at _all_ distracting, watching it go.

“You all right, chica?” America asked, trailing a fingernail along Kate’s forearm. For answer, Kate curled into her and burrowed, inhaling the scent of her neck.

“You’ve got to go,” she said, barely a whisper.

“No, but your Dad won’t find me here, and you need--”

“I need you to go to North Bar and find Clint and the others,” Kate said, swallowing her own need and the desperate way she was shaking. Billy, Teddy, Eli-- oh god, it’d kill Eli, having someone call him a trespasser. “I won’t be able to help them for a little; Dad threatened Billy and our friends. Can’t get them mixed up in this. But since I can’t leave, you need to tell Clint and Skye and… and everyone… what happened. Phil’ll… he’ll know what it means. That we were right, when we talked last night. You need to… you need to tell them that Dad is staying here this week and _Ian Quinn is staying with him._ ”

America cursed, and Kate nodded, weak. 

“That’s his fucking yacht out there. Guess it exists after all. You better go, babe.”

“Kate, no-- you can’t stay here with _him._ ”

“I won’t be alone, America,” Kate told her, and kissed her on her soft lower lip. “I’ll be fine. Please, go. They’ve got to know. We can _use_ this, don’t you see?”

She waited until America was entirely gone and she’d heard the balcony doors slide shut before she curled into a little ball behind the capris, and let herself cry.

**Five**

Avengers Tower gleamed in the early morning light, sleek and modern and looking uncomfortably like its designer was trying to compensate for some deficiency. After a weekend spent among the dunes on North Bar, it looked like something from another planet entirely.

Natasha and Phil hardly noticed as they entered the elevators; they’d been on the road since six AM, and still weren’t entirely awake. Not that the fatigue was particularly noticeable on either of them, Phil hoped. He’d been careful not to put on his suit till he got back to the Blue Peter, inserting his cufflinks while standing in front of the cracked mirror in the bathroom, straightening his tie under the buzzing fluorescents, and hoping the uneven lighting was the only reason he looked so pale.

Clint, who was going to be staying on LBI that day on call at the firehouse, had been with him, watching. He’d smoothed Phil’s tie carefully, before rumpling it again with the force of his kiss.

He’d treated Natasha only slightly more gently, hugging her as if he was afraid she was going to fly off to Mars when his back was turned. She’d returned the embrace with more dignity, but Phil still had a feeling Natasha would have preferred to knock Clint out, tie him to the back of the car, and drive off with him.

She hadn’t, thankfully. They returned her rental car at the nearest convenient location and Natasha rode back the rest of the way with him-- she’d already told Tony she’d met Phil on Long Beach Island, after all. It seemed simplest not to confuse their cover story.

Their conversation was desultory, both of them mostly lost in their own thoughts. Phil was glad for the company, though, for the way she slumped down next to him and stared out the window, as if she were any completely normal woman, and not the Black Widow at all. It might have only been for his benefit, but it was a considerable outward show of trust all the same.

_We’re on the same side now. Hell, we might have a shot at this yet._

As they rode the elevators up Natasha straightened and her face went a little distant, like she was remembering she was of royal blood, or like her knights were coming to kneel at her feet-- gracious, put-together, aloof, as if serenity were her birthright. Phil tugged at his tie, shot his cuffs, fiddled at the cufflinks, settled himself in, and just generally tried to imitate her.

He thought he’d done a decent job of it, that both of them had, when they stepped off the elevators into the common area in the penthouse.

All the Avengers were gathered, at not-even-nine-AM in the morning, and they turned towards the elevators as one when Natasha and Phil stepped off it. 

Steve Rogers was sitting on the long couch opposite the elevators, backlit and nearly haloed by the early morning sun streaking the huge windows behind him (slightly discolored in the one new pane of glass, the one that didn’t quite match the others). Tony Stark was standing behind him, fidgeting, looking dark and fragile as a custom bearing. Bruce had frozen in the act of pacing, his glasses in his hand, and Thor stood opposite him, still and drawn up and altogether regal. Sam was sitting next to Steve, hunched over on himself, elbows on his knees, just listening. He was the only one who didn’t look so stiff that a light breeze could knock him over.

Phil felt like he’d been caught sneaking home after a big party, which was absurd-- he wasn’t _sneaking_ anywhere.

“Well hello,” he said, “and good morning.”

“About time you two showed up,” Stark said, which really didn’t help Phil get over the impression he’d broken curfew. The glance Stark gave Natasha was… complex. Unreadable, at least to anyone who had known him as short a time as Phil had. Natasha might have understood it, and Pepper certainly would have, but Phil didn’t have time to ask for a translation.

Phil flicked his gaze over at Natasha, but she was still in bland mode, gone so gracious and distant she might have turned fae. 

“We’ve got a visitor,” Stark continued, still watching them both. Steve grunted, or maybe laughed-- whatever it was, there was no actual humor behind it.

“How nice,” Natasha drawled, and she gently tugged Phil further into the room. “Who?”

“Someone you know,” Stark said. “Probably better than us.”

And, clearly on cue, Agent Felix Blake stepped out from behind a pillar.

He came forward to stand quietly next to Stark, his hands clasped in front of him. His suit was pressed and his face was composed, except for the faint uptilt to his mouth.

That dark gaze lingered on Phil and then Natasha in turn, and Phil swallowed, hard.

“Hello, Phil,” he said finally, and his voice was… well it was his voice. Hadn’t changed a beat. “Long time no see.”

\----  
To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time on Washed Ashore: Blake! Quinn! Jawbones! Steve-- no! Tony-- no! Everyone, slow down! 
> 
> Sorry for the late posting, all-- I’m actually impressed I came this close enough to Sunday, on a chapter that nears 15,000 words. You can blame it on Felix Blake, who didn’t want to wait. He has this bad habit.


	20. Seasick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Felix is back at the Tower, and he’s up to something-- or is he? Meanwhile, in completely coincidental timing (or is it?), North Bar gets another visitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory Chicken Note: Some things even chickens can't prepare you for.
> 
> Posting note: Every Second Sunday posting resets with this Sunday. The next post will be January 18. (Or, you know, the rate I edit at, just after midnight January 19.)

**One**

“Hello, Phil,” Felix said, “long time no see.”

There were always going to be, Phil had realized long ago, things that nothing in his life could have prepared him for. Not military service or extensive reading, not debate clubs or Boy Scouts, not therapists or chickens, not Marcus Johnson or Doc Halliday herself. (Both of whom had at their advents been one of those things, in fact.) Through trial and error, he’d refined his SOP for those precedent-setting events: hang on with both hands, keep his mouth shut and his mind open, and not bother trying to make sense of things till after.

A large part of his reputation in the Rangers for coolness under fire had been won simply due to the application of the principle in the face of clusterfucks like Orlat.

A few days ago, ironically, Phil would have said he was more prepared than most to meet a ghost-- especially this one. After all, he'd already seen Marcus Johnson stalking the halls of SHIELD, having apparently dragged himself back from the land of the dead (mostly-- apparently he'd neglected to bring his eye with him). This time, Phil wasn’t even going in blind. He already knew that Felix Blake (né Hollis) was alive and well and walking the Earth.

And yet.

As it turned out, pretty much nothing Phil had ever experienced-- or had idly thought might be useful to experience at some point-- had prepared him for having his long-dead lover give him a casual hello and a “long time no see” while surrounded by a team of superheroes Phil was simultaneously trying to support and fool.

To be entirely fair, no-one had ever _claimed_ they could prepare him for that kind of experience. 

_Hell, the amount of practice I’m getting, I could practically teach the course. Maybe I should. I’m going to need something to fall back on when SHIELD burns me and Stark fires me._

Phil’s first instinct was to literally play dumb-- not like anything smart was going to come out of his mouth, anyway. His second instinct, which came barrelling along behind the first so fast it nearly tripped, was that staying silent was probably going to be counterproductive, and he should really just say something before he overthought it and screwed everything up.

What he said was:

“And whose fault was that?”

When he paused to analyze it, Phil decided it could have been worse. Brief, to the point, giving nothing away. Perhaps it was unnecessarily accusatory, and it entirely lacked the genial equanimity he usually tried to project during confrontations, but it cut fairly straight to the heart of the matter, without giving anything _much_ away yet, so at least a C+ for effort, really. 

_I can do it. I can pull this off._

He felt himself straighten and relax, realized just before he went under that his brain was cutting off critical thought in favor of read-and-react, and he let himself go, felt his lips curl into a faint smile.

Felix Blake was still Holly enough to catch it, to realize Phil was settling into that calm clear space in his head that usually came just before the storm. Perhaps that was why Felix reacted the way he did to Phil’s veiled accusation, ducking his head and letting his smile turn sad for the flicker of an instant before washing away.

“I’m not sure anymore,” Felix responded, and his voice scudded lightly over the gathering waves and the shoals beneath them both. 

Beside Phil, Natasha stiffened. He felt more than saw the way she went straight to fight or flight, at Felix's greeting, her new tension perceivable mostly on a molecular level: a slight chill to the air between them, a sense of changing possibility.

She’d walked off the elevator with the stride of a queen, aloof and ready to face out her teammates’ reactions to the fact that she’d spent the weekend with him on a secluded island, with nothing but his cousin, their dog, and their chickens, for company. Ready to lie for his sake, and Clint’s. 

_Nat’s got your back_ , Clint had whispered to him, breath warming the cold shell of his ear, as they’d left North Bar early that morning. 

Phil had devoutly hoped so, but not fully believed it until now, and if pressed he couldn’t have named a single signal she’d given to let him know she was still playing his game. She just radiated it, and gratitude swept over him. _Is this how she and Clint are together?_

Felix must have seen her stiffen as well, because he turned to her and ran a hand through his hair. From the jerkiness of the motion, he must have considered and rejected holding it out to her. _As if Natasha would ever be rude enough not to shake his hand. Then again, there’s a risk she’d use it to toss him on the floor._

“Hello, Natasha,” he said, “I’m sorry you were told I was dead. I've missed you.” Felix never had done anything so gauche as radiate sincerity-- no one would have believed it on his face. Unlike Phil himself, Felix had never been able to look unthreatening. But he did manage regret.

Natasha shrugged it off-- regret, rebirth, everything.

“These things happen,” she said, still so calm and in control, not-saying but clearly meaning _no use getting worked up about it._

Phil might even have believed her lack of reaction if he hadn’t seen her worked up about a resurrection, as recently as Friday night at a VFW dance. Even with a little advance warning, this was sub-zero compared to the way she’d practically vibrated in Clint’s presence. Was it just that the gravitational pull of her history with Clint was so much greater? Or would she have reacted more warmly to Felix before Phil had told her his story, before she had seen Felix flicker across the North Bar security cameras?

Natasha moved away from Phil and into the room, crossing over to Felix, who stood still and let her come. She stopped well within his personal space, close as she’d been to Phil when they’d danced on Friday night, and to his eye she looked as dangerous as she had then-- one false move and she’d explode. 

She took Felix’s chin between her thumb and finger and turned his face, examining him closely. 

“It’s really him,” Stark interjected, waving at Blake. “We did… he let us do some tests. It’s not a trick, Nat.”

 _Stark’s tone’s way off; not nearly enough snark_ , Phil’s brain noted idly, and then added _Now would have been a great time to be wearing that damned tie pin._

“I didn’t expect it to be a trick, Tony,” Natasha said, and dropped Felix’s chin, stepping back. He blinked after her, and straightened his tie.

“You aren’t surprised he’s alive, then?” Stark’s voice was still wrong, all paper politeness. He shifted then stiffened. Below him, Rogers did the same, like they’d just felt a cold draft crawl up their spines. Rogers was keeping himself from going horse-face by a sheer effort of will, but his nostrils were already looking decidedly equine. Stark was so damn casual it was painful. 

Bruce, Sam, and Thor were all watching with various degrees of cautious blankness, all of them so quiet that there must have been an agreement before Phil and Natasha arrived. _Let the team leaders deal with it._ Phil would have given a lot to know how long Felix had been in the Tower before them, and just how much he’d told the team.

Just at the moment, though, he was grateful that Stark and Rogers were in control.

Phil could have read those two in his sleep. Compared to Natasha, even to Clint or Skye, they were written in large print, extra-bold, and there was probably a braille translation to boot. He had mere moments to avert an Avengers-related disaster.

Phil was just opening his mouth to speak when Natasha beat him.

“I’m not surprised, no,” Natasha said, turning to Tony, “he’s made a habit of being alive when he isn’t supposed to be.” Tony winced, glancing between her and Felix.

“But you _knew?_ ” Rogers broke in, leaning forward, his eyebrows practically pleading at her. She nodded at him, and his face crumpled. Phil fought back the competing urges to shake him and to pet him on the head. Calm. Calm and even. No giving in to the forlorn-looking supersoldier.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell us?” Stark yelped. Natasha still didn’t seemed phased, so Phil left her to her explanations and let his attention settle on the not-so-dead man in question. 

Felix was watching the Avengers silently, face and body quite still. It was a stance Phil still knew as well as his own breathing.

Felix, like him, was balanced and waiting to see which way he had to jump.

 _He was nearly as good as you_ Fury’d told him. Of all people, Fury’d been in the best position to judge.

 _Nearly_ as good. That had been fifteen years ago, now.

Well. _Let’s see what the years have done._

“She didn’t tell you because she didn’t know until I told her so, yesterday,” Phil said. He was pleased to hear his voice come out far more smoothly than it had earlier, a sign that he’d slid fully back into the suit, into the mild-mannered headspace he’d created for himself. 

Stark opened his mouth to speak, and Phil pretended not to notice, going right along over the top of him. If he let Stark break in once, he was going to lose the thin thread of control over the situation that he’d managed to grab onto.

“And I only found out when I happened to see Agent Blake at SHIELD, as I left biocontainment on Wednesday.”

“And you recognized him,” Bruce broke in, looking between Phil and Felix as if they were both highly dubious specimens.

“Sort of,” Phil allowed. 

He let that hang a moment then put himself into motion, finally coming into the heart of the room to lean against another pillar, where he slid his hands into his pockets as if he was settling in for a polite chat. Between his smile and the relaxation in his body, Rogers calmed, and Bruce leaned back. Everyone turned slightly towards him, and he gave them all a soft little smile. _Easy. Easy. Nothing’s wrong. Nobody here but us chickens._

“I didn’t recognize Agent Blake as himself; I recognized who he used to be back in his Ranger days,” he continued, then nodded at Natasha. “As Ms. Romanov said, this is a habit of his.”

“Fury’s the one who said I’d be better staying dead,” Felix snapped, turning fully to him now and really meeting his eyes for the first time, across a distance that suddenly felt like no-man’s land.  
He hadn’t liked Phil’s answer, clearly.

_What? Did you expect me to deny knowing you? Got a little displacement going on?_

“Oh I know,” Phil said, “both times, or so I hear.”

“This related to why you disappeared on us after you finally got sprung from quarantine last week?” Stark asked, his stiffness breaking suddenly as he glared at Phil. It was a relief; twitchy and hyper-focused sat naturally on Stark.

“It was a bit of a shock,” Phil told him, with a smile that he hoped conveyed that ‘bit’ in this case meant ‘enormous’. "I was already exhausted, and that just tipped me over. It’s not every day you realize an old... friend... isn't buried in a mass grave in the Balkans after all. I wanted space to think-- and make sure I wasn't crazy-- before I went to Fury.”

“I’m more the ‘stalk right in and yell until someone pays attention’ type,’” Stark said, and that got a snort from Rogers (who really-- no _really_ \-- didn’t have room to judge anyone in that area), “but okay, I’ll buy it. And you went to Fury, yeah?”

“Yes. I went to Director Fury. Who reminded me that I am, however short a time I’ve been here, an agent of SHIELD,” Phil glanced over at Felix as he spoke, running his gaze up and down the man’s suit, “and that I didn’t get to just spread Level 7-classified secrets around to anyone I felt like telling. Especially not ones involving other peoples’ identities.”

There. 

Phil watched it begin to sink in, watched the Avengers watching him and felt the moment he had each one of them on a hook. No bait like the truth-- and very nearly the whole truth, at that. 

Felix felt it too; Phil didn’t even need to be looking at him to be able to tell. 

He looked anyway. Felix caught the glance and returned it, shook his head minutely and rolled his eyes. It was the exact same _there you go again, Phil_ shake he’d had since well before they were lovers, and the intimacy made Phil’s skin crawl. Felix held his gaze for a moment then tilted his head as if in concession.

Of _what_ , Phil would have given a lot to know.

"I’m sorry. ‘Mass grave in the Balkans?’" Rogers asked, turning to Felix, who held out his hands as if pushing the whole memory away. Which, in a way, he had done at the time, too. Only Phil carried the full weight of that story.

“My recruitment story's a little complex,” Felix responded. “Like I said, playing dead wasn't my idea. Fury thought it was safer for all concerned." 

Phil was fairly certain he caught Stark muttering something along the lines of “Fury thought it was safer for himself,” but decided it was best ignored, for the sake of a quiet life. 

“Director Fury didn’t share all of his reasons with me,” Phil said, directing it only to Felix. “But I wouldn’t expect him to-- I’m no Level 7.”

"I’m glad you’re loyal to Marcus still.” Felix said it warmly enough, but there, again, Phil’s spine prickled and he found himself looking for a hidden barb. “You always were, in the old days. Practically brothers, you two.”

“We were, right up until he died,” Phil responded, and yes, there his mouth went again, flapping off without him. “Hard to be best friends with someone you think is dead, even if it turned out he never was. Beginning to think that’s just standard SHIELD operating procedure; I’m too new to judge. But I assume there’s a reason you’re here now?”

On the periphery, he knew the Avengers were listening closely, watching Phil return volleys in a game he didn’t know the rules for or didn’t know the height of the net or whether he had a racquet or not, or even a ball at all and not a shuttlecock. He hoped they were enjoying the entertainment. 

“There’s a reason all right,” Felix said, and sighed heavily. There was a large low overstuffed ottoman near the couch, and he sat on it, flipping back his jacket tails. “There’s a reason. And it has to do with Clint-- with Agent Barton,” he looked up at each of the Avengers in turn, ending with Natasha, where his eyes lingered, “and why he died.”

 

**Two**

Skye was sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee in one hand, her tablet in another, and a chicken at her feet when Clint called to say there was a fire.

Natasha had been the one to point out that the conspiracists couldn’t afford to have North Bar vacant while Clint was on call in Gansett Light, hanging out at the fire hall-- not with random undead SHIELD agents infesting the place any time Clint left it to its own devices. It hadn’t been well-received on anyone’s part, largely because hell- _o_ , she had noticed North Bar was an island, right? If Clint had to have someone babysit any time he left that meant lots of boats and getting wet and logistics and it was just gonna be one more thing that ended up on Skye’s plate. 

Skye’d initially felt kind of frazzled by the idea but it’d been Phil who’d protested longest, on the grounds that if someone was really determined to sneak around North Bar, they'd probably be perfectly willing to hurt whoever was on the island in order to have free rein. He'd been looking at Skye as he said it.

Skye tried not to take that badly, since he wasn’t exactly _wrong_. Of the three of them, both Clint and America (who had arrived a little before noon with the news that Kate had been grounded and Quinn was on the island) could pretty obviously take care of their own damn selves. Skye, on the other hand-- in the past Skye’d relied on a mix of guile, puppy dog eyes, babbling, and luck to get herself out of trouble. And trouble before’d never taken the form of agents trained to snap your neck with one hand while brushing their teeth with the other.

Or whatever it was SHIELD agents did.

"Yeah, but," Skye had said to Phil when he tried to talk her out of it, "I'm willing to risk getting hurt in order to warn Clint and to find out who's doing the sneaking and why. Anyway, I don't want Lucky getting roofied again." _And if you don't agree I'll just wait 'till you’ve gone back to New York then sneak over anyway._

Phil had looked ready to argue further, when Natasha had popped a small black device out of her pocket and tossed it at Skye. It looked exactly like a lipstick-style cell phone charger, and Skye said as much.

"Taser," Natasha had responded. Skye dropped it on the table as if it had stung her, and stared. "Although it does charge phones in an emergency. But that drains the battery badly."

Phil’d given in to the inevitable at that point, especially since Clint wasn’t taking his side, and Skye’d motored over to North Bar in the morning, in the little boat she rented so often that the marina operator’d started to hint she should just buy it. She’d put it away in the boathouse to avoid alerting anyone the she was around, then headed for the cottage to scrounge the last of the breakfast Clint had made.

Two hours later, here Skye was, sitting at the breakfast table petting the newly-renamed Bucky the Hen with her bare toes, listening over the land line while Clint told her the Outrageous Egg was on fire, and the entire fire brigade was on its way. The sirens in the background had made his voice nearly indistinguishable. 

“I don’t like the timing,” she said. Bucky clucked in something that might have been agreement, and brushed around her ankles. (Bucky, a somewhat attenuated Buckeye hen, had been one of the Steves until Clint had insisted Natasha had to name a chicken as part of her induction into their conspiracy. She had narrowly escaped being renamed “Captain Americ-hen,” with Phil vetoing the name on the grounds that he was still their damned owner, after all.)

“That place is swimming in so much butter and bacon fat it’s a miracle there wasn’t a grease fire before now,” he replied, but Skye noticed he wasn’t exactly telling her she was wrong, either.

“Be careful and stay safe, all right? Phil’ll take the entire town out if you get hurt.”

“Skye.” Clint’s voice was warm over the phone, practically purring, and that was more disturbing than everything else put together. “When am I not careful?” 

He hung up before she could call him on that absolute, flagrant, pants-singeing lie. Skye looked at the phone for a long moment, her head buzzing along with the dial tone, then got up. 

_I'm probably going to look back on this and feel like a complete dork_ she thought, but she called Lucky to her, and shooed both him and Bucky in front of her out the door. 

The latter she locked in the chicken coop, the former in the shed. 

“I’m sorry, boy,” she told Lucky as she closed the door on his reproachful face. “I told the bosses I wouldn’t let you get hurt again, and I’m gonna keep that promise. You stay in here and keep quiet. And hopefully… hopefully it’ll be a really boring day and that’s all, right?”

He whined and scratched at the door as she left, but Skye was implacable.

Back inside, she set her cell phone down on the table and pulled up the feeds from the cameras she and Clint had planted around the island in the last few days. A facial recognition program was already running on the laptop. 

She’d pulled the Blue Peter’s security cameras yesterday and found as much footage as she could of the arrestingly-jawboned man that the Black Widow had tentatively identified as a SHIELD agent. Before coming over this morning, she’d poked her nose back through SHIELD’s firewalls, using the path Stark had forged and she had followed before, and pulled fresh data from SHIELD’s personnel files to run against the security footage. (Really, she was probably working with some of SHIELD’s files more than parts of SHIELD’s HR department-- someone should probably pay her or something. In fact, they ought to contract her to do some white-hatting for them and close up a couple vulnerabilities. Hell, maybe when all this was over she could convince someone to make her an offer. If, well… if she didn’t end up on their most-wanted list.)

Skye looked over her little set-up carefully and adjusted a couple of cables and the mouse. Tension began to inch its cold brackish way through her body, a slow tide rising from her guts and spreading outwards. 

_No one’ll come. This is all just paranoia. I’ll feel really silly in a couple hours._

After a moment, she dug the taser out of her pocket, and hooked it up to the laptop to charge. The tide of anxiety receded a tiny bit. (USB charging capacity on tasers. One of the most useful things she'd never imagined. Thank you, Tony Stark. Maybe Natasha would allow her to keep it, when everything was over?) 

After _another_ moment, she remembered to put on her socks and shoes, wincing as she brushed off chicken detritus from her earlier trip to the yard. 

_Jacket? Yes? That might get stuffy. But if I have to move fast? Eh._

She took the windbreaker off its hook by the back door and draped it across a chair. On second thought, she moved it to the table. It still looked out of place to her, like it was going to get tangled up or forgotten.

Skye moved the jacket back to its hook, and patted it down.

There.

It was only a matter of waiting, now, for whatever-- whoever-- might come.

As it happened, in a fit of synchronicity that almost made Skye believe (for the barest moment) in providence, the unforgettable jawbone popped up on the laptop just moments before it showed up on her phone.

"Grant Ward, Agent of SHIELD, what the hell are you doing sneaking out of our boathouse?" Skye muttered as she stared at the remarkably scowly SHIELD ID picture.

The anxiety flooded her, breaking through every dike and levee she’d tried to raise against it, every part of her from eyebrows to toes suddenly drowning in it. The idea of doing nothing, of just _watching_ as he slunk around North Bar, was unbearable.

 _The boss'll_ kill _me if I go out there._

Skye waited another moment, trying to pretend that just reading the guy's unclassified SHIELD profile was enough. Height, 6’3”. Eye Color, brown. Hair color, black. Clearance level, 7. Current assignment: mobile unit SHIELD- 19623, DOB, martial status, citizenship, all rolled by but told her nothing.

If she wanted to find out what Agent Ward was up to, it wasn’t going to happen sitting here in a nice cozy cottage, watching him flit from screen to screen. Even if it was safer. Even if she’d been given _very explicit instructions_ by both bosses not to engage.

_Course, Phil isn't here. And if he were-- hell, if either of them were-- they'd be halfway to the boathouse by now._

Welp. Faint heart never won fair anything. 

Skye did remember to send a text-- as Phil had made her pinky-swear that she would if she was going to do something stupid-- before she wandered out, taser in one hand and phone in the other, to find out where their secret visitor was headed.

(She ran back in a moment later, to shut down and hide the laptop. She wasn’t _completely_ new to this, after all.)

**Three**

“I died on the Helicarrier,” Felix Blake said, “quite thoroughly. When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed, and Fury was there. Told me I had been dead for forty-seven seconds. Told me you all’d won,” he turned to Steve and Tony, smiling a little smile that one someone else might have qualified as shy. It sat oddly on Blake’s sharp features, a coquettish mask over a carnivore’s face, and she wondered if Tony had ever learned that Blake was never diffident unless he was playing a game.

Natasha watched him as he settled in on the ottoman and leaned his elbows on his knees, looking as at home in the refurbished (in fact mostly-rebuilt) Avengers Tower as he had in Tony’s old Malibu home-- the one now under the waves off the California coast. Blake had always known how to control a crowd when he wanted to; Natasha fought not to look back at Phil, wondering if that was familiar to him, as well. If Blake had learned it at his feet.

 _Not at his feet, Natasha, you’ll only start picturing things you really shouldn’t._ It had been disturbing enough, overhearing Phil and Clint in their bed and having to shut down the part of her brain that kept insisting on _imagining_ everything. Learning what Phil and Felix Blake had been to each other back in their Ranger days opened whole new _vistas_ in inappropriate visualizations. 

Still, it was a valid question to ask about their past-- she’d always thought Blake one of the subtlest operators out there, at least until she’d met Phil Coulson.

Phil, who’d managed to smooth over his shock and pull himself together in the span of a few sentences, pull the initiative away from Tony and Steve completely, and make Blake drop at least one of the mouthful of secrets he was squirreling away. It was as elegant, as spare, as breathtaking as watching any virtuoso perform. Blake had been-- was-- a joy to watch as well; the two of them together must have been able to make entire villages dance to their tune, like so many basketed cobras. No wonder Marcus Johnson had coveted them for SHIELD. Even getting half of the duet was a coup. 

And now he had both.

“Thanks in large part to you,” Steve told him, referring to their victory against Loki and the Chitauri, and Blake shrugged it off.

“Well. I did what I could. Fury filled me in on the tower, and on you all. He said you, Captain, were working for SHIELD, Stark was keeping both himself and Dr. Banner busy, Thor’d taken that ba-- your brother, I’m sorry, Thor-- back to Asgard. In other words, there wasn’t much I could do for the Avengers Initiative at the moment.” 

Steve was frowning hard at Fury’s analysis, Thor had just looked bleak, and Bruce had snorted quietly at the word “busy”, but Natasha thought there was a fair amount of justice in it. Just after the Battle of New York, they’d all had their own internal rebuilding to do, as well as the external. Maybe if Blake _had_ been around, it would have been different, but there hadn’t really been an active Avengers team to work with until after the Triskelion, when they’d all clung together in defiance of Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and anyone else who dared try to question them. 

Where Blake’s presence might have made a difference, she acknowledged, was in her own heart. And Clint’s. Blake knew it, too, and gave her a genuinely regretful smile.

“So I told him I was happy to go back to Strike Team Delta, and he assured me that Clint and Natasha,” he nodded at her, “were in good hands. What he needed me to do was _stay dead._ There was work he needed a ghost to do, and I was the best one for the job.”

“He considered your duty to SHIELD a greater one than consoling your intimates?” Thor frowned, speaking for the first time, looking unsettled. “Surely that is a heavy burden for either friend or commander to ask a man to take upon himself.”

“It wasn’t my first time playing dead,” Blake looked back at Phil now, dark eyes meeting light ones, and Natasha thought she saw Phil’s expression shift, just under the pleasant surface, into something oddly knowing. “And it’s hard to say no to Nick Fury. His reasons seemed compelling at the time. And Fury’s Director of SHIELD and I’m a just another agent. If I'd had my freedom to choose.... Well. I didn't. I understood Fury better, once the Triskelion fell and it turned out we’d all been betrayed. I realized that he must have been working with you, Stark, the whole time, had to have suspected. He’d needed an ace in the hole, someone really senior who he could hide away, so they wouldn’t be compromised.”

“We didn’t have need to know,” Steve muttered, and Natasha knew he was flashing right back to the last days of the Triskelion-- she knew she was. 

“To be fair to him,” Blake said, “Any of you would have been high-value targets for HYDRA agents. When he approached you both for help, how open was he?”

 _Not very_ , Natasha thought, and wondered if Steve had ever fully understood just how big a risk Fury’d run by giving Steve any warning whatsoever, by showing him Project Insight, inviting him to dig and find the secret work Fury and Stark had been doing, trying to tease out just how deeply the rot had set in. Not that Fury’d been expecting to be shot by the Winter Soldier, but the wheels had already been set in motion. Steve and Natasha had, essentially, either been tossed out to the wolves as bait, or sent to harry the foxes home. 

Steve had found Natasha, they had found Zola’s bunker, then found Sam, then nearly gotten killed-- then Hill had led them to Fury’s secret lair beneath the dam, where she’d found Clint and Stark waiting. And Fury himself, all healed. Mostly healed. 

(It had taken a long time for her to forgive Fury for that-- a long time and the bitter realization that he’d known he couldn’t take the risk that she’d inadvertently reveal he was alive, if captured. He must have assumed mind control or drugs were a possibility with HYDRA. Must have. He knew she wouldn’t break, goddamnit. So she’d told herself, on long nights spent watching for the morning. So _Clint_ had told her, and she’d believed him.)

The cracks building now, creaking and threatening to break the Avengers apart, were all there from the beginning, really. Fury must have seen, must have known what would happen when they had leisure to start picking at the seams. No wonder he had been so desperate to find them a good liaison despite the thinness of SHIELD’s ranks: an apology for what he’d had to do as much as a tool. Not that either Tony or Steve appreciated the “gift” of Victoria Hand. And yes, Natasha thought, Blake might have been able to put them back together, or at least keep the cracks from widening as far as they had. Phil Coulson might yet manage it-- if they could just bring Clint home.

Steve must have had some answer for Blake, because he was nodding in agreement, a little _see, just as I was saying_. Blake gave one heavy sigh, presumably watching water go under the bridge, before he continued.

“But I was able to do good work, at least, while I was out there-- my team’s excellent, the best SHIELD had to offer, frankly. We’re the ones that first encountered Project Centipede, put SHIELD onto them.” He glanced around him for reaction, and smiled when he got it. “Nasty people. Too bad we got distracted by HYDRA.”

“Amador said Clint had been in Centipede’s files,” Bruce said, and Blake nodded at him.

“I told you this involved Clint. I’m nearly there. It’s just… it’s easier to tell it in order. There’s a lot I don’t understand yet.”

“Oh, don’t let us stop you,” Sam said, the first time _he’d_ spoken up, and Natasha wondered what he was making of it all. Sam being Sam, he probably _wasn’t_ yet. Just listening, letting everything come to him. Like Clint, like herself, like Bruce, like Phil-- possibly that was why they were the ones who always found themselves patching everyone else up. 

Phil was still leaning against that damned pillar with a faint smile on his face, and Natasha wasn’t sure if he was trying to remain unnoticed so he could escape quickly, or if the smile meant he had a plan. Either way, it was unexpectedly attractive. She could see exactly how he’d managed to get Clint to fall in love with him in the space of a few weeks, if he’d seen that little smirk day in and day out. Even with the revelation that his secret was _Clint_ , waiting at home for him, driving him, Phil was still a mystery to her, and she would have given a lot to know exactly what those microexpressions meant.

Blake rose from the ottoman now, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets as he started to pace, taking the story back up.

“It started with Dr. Franklin Hall. I thought we’d tracked him to Malta, to a mansion owned by an old colleague of his. But we couldn’t go get him; Malta wouldn’t let us in, or so I’m told. Came from high up somewhere. The mansion; hell, half the island, exploded, later on. You’ll remember in the news, how Ian Quinn was having a party, barely evacuated everyone in time. We thought it was an earthquake; I hear we know differently now. But that did make me wonder, about the diplomatic issue. And… I had some personal setbacks that led to other questions, about whether something was wrong with our intel, or our briefs. I started digging.”

Natasha watched Phil settle in, a faint frown flickering across his face. Bruce grunted, and Tony perked up. Sam rustled a little, at the mention Hall, reaching down to play with the edge of his cast. Two names, now, that had come back to haunt them.

“No one,” Blake said, ignoring the effect his words were having, “ever proved Quinn’d taken Hall, but I had him watched. He’d definitely been doing _something_ wrong. The problem was, none of it really fell under SHIELD’s jurisdiction, or seemed to link back to anything we cared about.”

“Except for Dr. Hall himself,” Tony said, and Blake nodded. “I know. I checked too. Age-- Felix, don’t blame yourself. If JARVIS and I couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there to find.” He was treating Blake like the man had just hatched from a cocoon, and was going to crumble if poked too hard. Natasha caught herself just before she rolled her eyes.

One thing Blake was just _not_ was born yesterday. 

“Well I feel bad about it, now. Responsible.” Blake waved down Tony’s instinctive protest and kept going. “Something I poked started an investigation in SHIELD, I think.” 

He had them all on tenterhooks now, and he knew it. Their living room was his stage, and with each circuit he made they all tensed, leaned forward, became his audience and his supporting cast at once. If she hadn’t been feeling the tug, wondering when their cue was coming, she’d have been impressed as hell. 

Blake paused, turned slowly to gather them all in, and shrugged quietly. “That’s what put Agent Amador and Hand on the path that led to the discovery Hawkeye’d been absconding with Project Centipede files and trying to strike a deal with Quinn.” And there it was, their cue.

General outcry.

Blake let it roll over the room for a moment, and Natasha fought off her own shiver long enough to watch him watch them. From his pillar, only Phil seemed mostly unmoved, and his gaze had gone dark. If Blake noticed, he gave no indication.

“Oh, I’m not saying I think Clint _did_ it,” he said, when he seemed to think he’d gotten enough reaction out of them all. “I’ve worked with him since he first came to SHIELD, off and on-- and it’s hard… as close as we were… to imagine. Some people say maybe Loki changed him, warped him somehow. But I didn’t believe a word of it-- so since I was digging anyway, I started to dig there, too.”

“So did I,” said Tony, starting to pace himself, moving out from behind the couch and stalking up to Blake. “But everything pointed to _him_. There was no way… there _was_ no other trail. Felix, c’mon, between me and JARVIS, we’ve managed to dig out almost all of SHIELD’s dirty little secrets. Hell, we even picked up on HYDRA. I mean, okay, it took a little, that one, but we did. We’d have seen… we’d have _seen_.”

It was all so very third act just before the denoument that Natasha felt like she ought to be dressed up and sitting in a little velvet seat that kept threatening to flip closed on her. Tony Stark had always been made for the stage, but she’d forgotten how good a straight man Blake could play. 

“I think you would, yes,” Blake told him, “Unless… unless it came from high up. _Very_ high up. At first I didn’t find much, but the break with HYDRA gave me the hook I needed, paradoxically. When it all started coming out, and we found out that John Garrett had been HYDRA? That was my break.” There was a general wince at the name, and Blake smiled back at them. “Oh, I know. He was my friend, too. It took me a while to believe. But when I started digging into _his_ history, I found something I didn’t expect: whatever Clint was doing, Garrett had done before him. Garrett had ties to Project Centipede-- nothing SHIELD had picked up on, but he did. It gave me an in _I_ needed to clean house a little, or so I thought, but I got told not to move on it. That’s when I found out Amador and Hand had been digging into Project Centipede themselves, after my experiences, and they found out what Clint had been doing. It didn’t start until after the fall of the Triskelion-- HYDRA must have been protecting them. With them gone, Clint started to work.”

“No,” Thor boomed, “I will not believe it of Hawkeye.” 

It broke the spell that had been growing on Natasha, and she pulled back from Blake to find everyone staring at Thor. _Got a little too lost in listening, there,_ she thought ruefully. Because of _course_ it wasn’t Clint. She’d just seen him, just heard him talk-- and had the girl Skye’s evidence about what they thought _had_ happened to set him up. 

“You know he wouldn’t,” she told Blake, clearly startling him, from the way his eyes whipped towards hers. She glared at him, Strike Team Delta to Strike Team Delta. He’d pulled her and Clint out of spots they’d fully expected to make their graves, out of Budapest itself. What the hell had happened to him if he’d believe _that_? What the _hell_ was his game?  
Unless he’d never actually trusted them at all. 

Somehow, finding out Felix Blake had played dead-- twice-- to loved ones hurt less than that idea. 

He still knew her well enough, at any rate, to know he’d stepped way out of line.

“I don’t want to believe it,” he told her, gentling her down like someone trying to feed a cat a pill. It wasn’t a mental image she much appreciated, but she let her back un-arch. “Clint never did get to tell his story. Maybe he didn’t know he was doing what he was supposed to be doing. The other option was that Fury authorized it, as some part of a larger plan, and then had to burn it. Or that the the records were altered and it wasn’t Clint at all; I honestly have no idea which likely. If he hadn’t been stupid enough to run and then get himself killed, maybe he could have cleared that up. In any case, it became increasingly obvious to me that if anyone was going to find the truth, it wasn’t going to be Fury. There was too much at SHIELD that was way off. I had to act. I had Quinn traced and any… possible compatriots… followed. And that’s why I’m here.”

“You need our help following Ian Quinn?”

“No. Once I had the information about Garrett protecting Project Centipede, and about Hawkeye, I was finally able to trace some outside sources, link all of it with a company called Cybertek. I know what Quinn is doing and why.”

If Natasha’d thought about it on Saturday, hell on Sunday morning, she’d have expected that she’d be elated to hear those words. Certainly Phil should be. Like a ray of sunshine squiggling its way through the clouds after a hurricane. It all fit.

Well-- with the exception of Clint actually passing information, that was.

But otherwise, everything was starting to _make sense_ , and the pieces Skye had, or could get, could hold the final key to the solution. 

So why was her stomach sinking? Why did she want to grab Blake by the lapels and tell him to just hold his goddamn horses? When it had always been him grabbing her and Clint by the well-laden utility belts and holding them back?

No one else seemed to be having her problem. Well, Phil might be, but Phil’d made himself so inconspicuous it actually took her a minute to realize he wasn’t just another part of the pillar. He didn’t even glance at her. _Should I worry? Or is this a private affair?_

“I need your help taking Ian Quinn down,” Blake was saying now, and every Avenger was with him, Natasha could tell. Yes. Of course. Finally some _action._

“How?” Steve asked.

“I don’t trust SHIELD… I never thought I’d have to say that, but I don’t.” Blake said, and Steve snorted in response. “I wish I could trust my team, but I don't know who might report to Fury."

It was a measure of how well Blake was holding the room that no one looked over at Phil to see how he was reacting to that. In fact, Tony and Steve both seemed to have decided that he was as much a part of the furnishings as the pillar he leaned against. Certainly his expression was as smooth and cosmopolitan. Only his eyes seemed at all lively, and he was watching his team, not Blake. 

_Like he's looking for a trap._

Natasha looked back at Tony, Steve and Blake, and wondered just how much of this play had been rehearsed.

Blake was still speaking, earnest, his nerves slipping out of the seams of his perfect suit.

"I need the best-- and I need people I know won't be compromised. Only you can help. And we don’t have a lot of time to do it in. Fury is going to learn I’ve ditched my team and come here pretty soon. And Quinn and his cronies have gotten nervous. They’re scrambling-- and I think they’re nearly ready to move their factories. Yes, factories,” he said when Tony opened his mouth to ask a question. “I can explain on the way, we don’t have time. Please, come with me now. Before anyone knows I’m here. This can be… a training mission, or something of the sort. But we have to stop Ian Quinn.”

“Right,” Steve said, standing up and looking them all over. Tony was nearly vibrating, hands playing with the silver bands on his wrists. Thor straightened under Steve’s gaze, and turned on whatever internal switch it was that made him radiate courage and honor and other ridiculous Asgardian traits-- what Clint had called his Prince Switch. Of the watchers, Sam and Bruce were switching into action mode, heads tilting up, watching Steve. Natasha moved forward a step, an instinctive reaction when her team caught a scent.

Only Phil stayed back, on the fringes, like Blake himself.

“Avengers, Assemble!” Captain America said. 

 

**Four**

 

Jawbones-- er, Agent Ward-- had already picked the lock to the bunker by the time Skye crept up on him. He slipped into the bunker as she watched.

Seeing him was actually a relief. When she’d reached the spot that she’d figured would let her intercept his path towards the bunker, everything had been quiet and still. No faint crunch of twigs to give him away, or buttons left on the path, or fresh footprints in the mud. Skye knew she was kind of out of her element, trying to read tracks-- that was a Hawkeye thing, and by that she meant a guy-Hawkeye thing (a Hawkguy thing?). Kate was a city girl still, through and through. 

Skye’d crouched for a moment on the path, unsure if he’d passed already or not. It was probably wisest to wait, she’d decided, and tried to settle in. The sandy soil had crumbled under her feet, wet leaves slipping against her soles, and the wind picked up and sent chills crawling up under her jacket, sending goose bumps up her ass.

 _All right, already_ , she’d thought, feeling vaguely dorky about it, _I’m goin’, I’m goin’._

She let Ward get inside the bunker before she moved, trying her best to remember how Clint’d shown her to walk silently, rolling her steps and ready to duck into the nearly-bare bushes at any moment. (This late in October, the dune grass would have arguably been better cover, but it wasn’t anywhere near close enough.) The barrel of the lipstick taser was slick with the sweat of her palm, and she rolled it convulsively, clutching hard to make sure she didn’t drop it from her rapidly stiffening fingers.

Skye might be new to this skulking-in-the-woods thing, but she wasn’t a complete idiot. She paused as she came up to the make-or-break point, where she’d need to be out in full view of the door, and waited for as long as she could stand, to make quite sure he wasn’t going to come back out.

When she was sure it was safe, she took a deep breath and sprinted round the last curve of the path and slammed her body against the outside wall, breathing hard. Her arms splayed against the sides of the bunker, in what her brain hazily told her was the best movie-style spy fashion, as she gathered herself. A faint scrape and thump from inside the bunker confirmed that he was inside, and she peaked around the edge of the still-open door.

He wasn’t anywhere in sight.

_Okay. He’s either head-down and rifling in the crates, or behind the door itself. Which would mean he heard me._

The wise thing to do, of course, would be to run. To slam the door shut, find something to brace it with, and _wait for backup._

Which was great in theory. In practice, Boss One was back in New York along with the Black Widow and Boss Two was fighting the grease fire currently threatening to engulf their favorite breakfast spot. Kate was confined to quarters, America was… wherever the hell America went when she wasn’t busy mooning around Kate or waiting tables. Skye wasn’t about to call on Doc Halliday, even though the prospect of the good Doc leading an interrogation was actually intriguing. Speaking of trained interrogators, while Tasha the hen was pretty damned amazing she was still a chicken.

So, realistically, Skye was looking at keeping a full-blown and very angry SHIELD Agent captive for _hours_ , buzzing around like an angry hornet in a bunker more designed to keep things _out_. Skye’d met Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov-- and Phil Coulson, if it came to that. Any of them would have been out of the bunker in minutes. She had to assume this Ward character wouldn’t be that much less competent, if left to his own devices.

Hell, he might be finishing his work and considering escape at that very moment. 

_Right. Only one thing to do, and that’s the stupid thing._

Skye inched her thumb over the taser’s trigger, pulled out her cell phone with her other hand and set the flashlight app, then stepped into the stillness of the bunker, hoping like hell she could get the drop on the man inside.

After all the hours she’d spent sorting through Quinn’s crates, removing the bits of tech she and Clint thought they could repurpose, Skye knew practically every inch of the bunker as well as she knew her own van. Unlike the van, it smelled faintly of old socks and mushrooms. Dust was still heavy on equipment and protective tarps in the corners she and Clint hadn’t passed over. Light filtered in from the doorway, leaving everything in its path washed out and overexposed. The shadows gathered thickly in the corners where neither the light from the doorway nor the thin blue beam of her cell phone penetrated.

“Hello?” Skye said, and she didn’t have to fake the quaver in her voice. 

Nothing but silence greeted her.

“Hello, is anyone here? Frank?”

Still nothing-- not a rustle, not a heavy breath. Hell. 

“Damnit,” she muttered, as if she were talking to herself this time, “if it’s one of the chickens again, I’m going to-- eep!”

A broad arm snaked around her throat.

Skye froze.

“Hello,” said the man, pulling her back against himself with enough pressure around her neck to make her breath catch and her vision flare and scatter. “Please drop what you’re holding.”

Skye thought for about a half second about giving a test wriggle and trying to escape, but he was pressed up so close against her back, holding her, that she could feel every last muscle his chest possessed, the bite of some sort of little boxes at his belt, the thick leather of his gloves. 

“What the fuck? Who are you?” she managed to grind out. “This isn’t funny. Let me go. I belong here.”

His breath was hot against her ear and offensively minty as he laughed.

“Come on, Skye, be a good girl. I know what you can do with a cell phone. Drop it now. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

_He knows my name?_

Skye shuddered at the realization and felt his arm tighten around her neck in warning.

 _I am in such deep shit_ she thought, as her knees turned to jelly. She sagged in his grip.

Slowly, the fingers of her left hand loosened, the cell swinging from her fingertips.

His breath hitched, the chest behind her going still as granite.

With a long, defeated sigh, she dropped the cell phone. 

The phone hadn’t hit the floor before she’d jammed the taser in her right hand into the meat of his thigh. 

Skye felt a fleeting moment of regret that she hadn’t been able to reach his groin.

He didn’t scream.

That was the horrible bit, really. 

He didn’t scream, he just jerked and went down, the arm around her neck convulsing, choking off her air. She grabbed it with both hands and went down with him as he collapsed.

Her hands slapped hard against the concrete floor of the bunker at the bottom of their fall, and she immediately pushed upwards, trying to heave him off while he was still helplessly twitching on top of her like an upended magic fingers bed. 

_Least I can breathe now_ she thought frantically as she tried to drag herself out from under him. _Just how heavy is this jerk?_

She could feel him tensing, groaning, trying to pull his muscles and nerves back under his control by sheer force of will. Somewhere buried beneath the terror, she was dimly aware how impressive it was. His back arched and his elbows braced, and that was just enough for her to wriggle free. 

His convulsions stopped just as her foot pulled loose, and then it was a race.

She nearly made it, was nearly on her feet when his hand wrapped around her ankle.

He tugged, and she splayed, hard, on the floor, teeth knocking together as her chin hit. Skye had a moment to register the disturbing blankness of his face as he struggled to his knees, his grip on her ankle tight to the point of agony.

“Mistake,” he told her, with a cold smile.

“Big one,” America agreed, as her fist met his jawbone.

 

**Five**

Once presented with the chance to take down Ian Quinn and find out what had happened to Hawkeye, the Avengers moved at supersonic speed, and in multiple directions at once. If they’d been cartoons, their legs would have blurred into pinwheels.

Tony and Steve were moving for the Quinjet before they’d quite finished shouting “Avengers Assemble,” and they dragged everyone in their wake. Well, everyone except the Falcon. He and his busted leg, Tony’d explained as they went, were going to stay at the Tower and try to buy them some time. 

There was a brief break in the locker room for Steve and Natasha to skim into their suits, and Bruce to find his stretchy pants. Tony grabbed the suitcase armor and headed to prep the Quinjet, and Natasha tried not to read too much into the fact that he hadn’t asked her to fly it.

They lost Thor on the way to the landing pad on the roof. He stopped short as they strode down the last corridor, as a woman’s muffled voice started yelling from his pocket. As he pulled it out, the words resolved themselves into _... a lover, I’m a child, I’m a mother, I’m--_

“Pardon me, friends,” Thor said, looking confused, “but Darcy calls me. She does so seldom.” The ringtone cut off in the middle of “between” as he answered.

They didn’t wait for him, and when he caught up with them, it was at a trot. He slowed only slightly, long enough to say “Jane is distraught, and I must go. She says the destruction of all we hold dear is imminent. Darcy cannot tell if she means the solar system, the world, or merely her funding.”

“Go,” Steve said, because with Jane Foster any or all of the three were equally likely. 

Phil glanced briefly at Natasha as Thor sped past them, on his way to the roof to take flight. It was a mild glance, just a little _what ya gonna do?_ , but it was enough. Down two Avengers, and they hadn’t even made it to the Quinjet. 

_Your job makes you paranoid, Natasha. There’s no way that was calculated._

Felix Blake brought up the rear, but as they came out onto the landing pad Tony poked his head out of the Quinjet and urged him forward, turning to duck back inside without bothering to wait for his answer. 

Blake had clearly lost whatever control of the Avengers he’d had as he told his story in the still morning light of the common room. He didn’t seem at all put-out by that-- nor should he, from Natasha’s point of view. They were doing it in their own way, but the Avengers were going exactly where he wanted them, and all he had to do was hang back and let them. Now, he gave Natasha a brief little eyebrow-waggle, his old “well that’s Stark for you,” before he sped up.

The others followed him docilely into the Quinjet.

_Like sheep, or like goats?_

Natasha glanced over at Phil now, strapping himself into one of the jumpseats in preparation for takeoff. Was he impressed with Blake and his subtle superhero-herding skills at this moment or not? And was he was feeling the same odd sinking sensation in his chest as she was in hers?

_I want to believe this is it, this is our break. How many times did Blake come find us in the middle of hell?_

Phil glanced up and met her eyes, and his own were steady and light, giving nothing away.

_Two nights ago, Felix Blake was on North Bar, while we were all gone. Just before we found listening devices traceable to Ian Quinn, that Phil-- that Coulson-- swore were new._

She sat back and closed her eyes, swallowing bile. 

Of all the possible explanations for those two facts that left Blake innocent, many sorted into _misunderstanding_ , more into _extraordinary precautions_ , and several, sadly, into _Coulson was playing me-- and Clint._ The little part of her that had reserved judgement all along, even while agreeing to their plans, even while listening to Skye, even while naming one of Coulson’s chickens, was beginning to mutter in its sleep. The man was, after all, an even better snake charmer than Felix Blake. 

If she’d only had more _time_ ; time to do her research; to talk with May and prod her about Coulson, the way she should have done ages ago; to have James check on Skye’s stories! Clint was the one who was best at going with his gut; she’d always relied on being better informed than anyone else. 

_For the moment, then, trust Clint’s gut. And wait, as he says, to see if the wind shifts._

\----

“Phil,” Felix said, coming back from where he’d been conferring with Tony in the cockpit, and sat down next to him with a little sigh before strapping himself in. Phil stiffened at the movement, the glide of suit sleeve against suit sleeve, and spent half a confused moment trying to decide whether or not Felix’s gesture had been familiar to him.

 _Fuck it. Familiar or not, makes no difference. He’s an unknown now, anyway._

Of course he’d corner Phil just at lift-off, when he was trapped by his five-point harness and the forces of gravity into staying where he was. 

Phil considered his options, and replied to Felix with nothing more than a polite eyebrow-raise. Felix ducked his head again, that stupid little faux-modest smile on his face.

“I probably deserve that from you,” Felix told him. “When all this is over, I’d… I’d like to talk. There’s a lot I’d like to tell you.” 

It was said quietly enough, but Phil caught Natasha’s glance at them. _Right. No privacy here._

“I’m not against it, Felix,” he said, and did his best to pitch his voice to the Felix of sixteen years gone, not this new, older, steeled version. He was on such thin ice already, the last thing he needed to do was signal to anyone listening just how ambivalent he was about Felix at the moment. “I’m just not sure either of us need it.”

“We don’t?” Felix’s voice was gentle enough to be nearly teasing.

“It’s all past, all dead and gone. What’s important now," Phil jerked his chin at Natasha, strapped in across from him, and Captain America next to her, just finishing buckling himself in, “is holding these guys together.” As he said it, Phil felt his lungs contract, his breath hitch in his throat. What the hell was _that_ about? That weird little surge of fondness?

He blamed Clint.

Just on principle.

“Yes,” Felix followed his gesture, and his gaze darkened. “I put a lot of time into getting them all together; I guess I feel responsible.”

“It’s a good team, even with everything going on at the moment,” Phil told him, trying to shove down the unwanted urge to snap that they weren’t his to claim. “A lot to be proud of, Felix.” 

(Phil could admit to himself that he might be using Felix’s hated first name more than needed. A bit. Clint had not been wrong to call him petty, back when he’d called Kate _Ms. Bishop_.)

“Oh,” Felix responded, with his own tired little smile, “that’s all on Fury and Victoria Hand and you. Isn’t it? I haven’t had my hand in for two years now.”

Some sharpness in his tone, an unexpectedly bitter note like oversteeped coffee, had Phil struggling not to react.

“And I only just got here,” he said, deliberately keeping his voice sunny. “They hold themselves together, when it comes down to it. Or else no one does.” _And whatever you’re doing here, Felix, whether it’s redemption you’re looking for, Clint you’re trying to avenge, or whether you’re running off and abandoning your old life again, you’d better remember that._

The flare of defensiveness Phil felt on behalf of the whole damned frustrating lot of them nearly choked him. These were _superheroes_ , the actual real deal, people who’d fought gods and monsters and survived. Sure, Stark still bounced between teasing him and setting tests, sure Captain America was going to end up getting strangled one of these days, and Thor kept on flitting off on strange side-quests (like now, for instance-- perfect goddamn timing), sure Banner and his alter ego were two opposing bombs requiring careful handling, and Natasha still might decide at any moment that he’d look better shocked and twitching on the floor.

They were, also, all of them, fiercely-- and often foolishly-- _good_ , in that same selfless way Clint was. He'd met people like them before, not often, but frequently enough to realize they didn’t, any of them, understand just what an unnatural thing they were doing. As if they all thought the thing humans-- or supersoldiers or gods-- were created for was to instinctively run _towards_ the fire. 

It was a trait they all shared, though just at the moment Stark and Rogers would have hated to hear it, with a certain Marcus Johnson of his acquaintance. They were all constitutionally incapable of giving up.

With Clint gone, presumed dead and perhaps disgraced, with their trust in their allies from SHIELD shattered, seeing enemies at every corner and disagreeing on half of them, the Avengers were still holding themselves together.

_For now._

Felix shifted at his side, and Phil blinked. Fifteen years of questions to ask, of bitterness and mourning, and somehow, Felix was a side-issue only. 

“You didn’t get any coffee on the way up, did you?” Felix asked, his tone brittle, “you never could focus without caffeine.”

_Oh? Don’t you like it when I don’t pay attention to you?_

“Focused just fine in Quito,” Phil said, and met his glance, “despite the irony." 

The Quito debacle had gone down in the middle of a coffee plantation-- coffee cherries all around him, above and below and crunching under his feet when he ran over the branches that had come off in machine-gun fire. The four of them, Phil and Felix and Marcus and May, had been up over thirty-six hours at that point without pausing to eat or caffinate. When he'd thought the others weren't looking, Phil'd grabbed a couple of twigs heavy with ripe berries and bit down.

The taste, before he nearly broke a molar on the green bean beneath it, had been unforgettable. Phil'd seriously contemplated emigrating to a coffee-producing country, before the gunfire had made him reconsider.

"Yeah," Felix said, and the bitterness was, if anything, becoming more pronounced. "I remember. One of Fury's favorite stories, whenever someone complained about unexpectedly shitty conditions on an op."

"I... honestly, that's kind of disturbing." 

Felix shrugged.

"He missed you, I think. Given the stories."

"He could have told me he wasn't dead any time he wanted," Phil grumped, and tried not to add _I notice you never bothered, either._ Fury’d thought about him often enough to tell stories, but never bothered to come after him in all those years? His stomach sank at the notion. What the hell had Felix _told_ Fury about Phil, to keep him away?

Just as he was seriously contemplating how deeply down the rabbit hole he truly wanted to dive, Stark asked Blake to come to the cockpit to give him directions. Phil’s barely noticed the Quinjet leveling off during their conversation, and he barely suppressed a startled glance around. No need to give Felix the satisfaction.

Felix heaved a sigh and unbuckled himself, then stood and straightened his jacket in one fluid motion, every inch the SHIELD agent girding himself for battle. 

The wink he gave Phil before he slipped forward to the cockpit made Phil's blood run cold.

He had about a half minute to contemplate its meaning before Captain Rogers unbuckled himself and came over, slipping down into the seat Felix had vacated.

"Hey," he said, and Phil fought down a reflexive blush-- something that he really felt ought not to be happening after three weeks of close quarters. "It's strange, isn't it, talking to someone you thought was dead?"

“I'm getting more practice at it than I would have thought possible,” Phil said. 

He looked over at Rogers and found himself being watched far more closely than he thought was entirely reasonable. _I’m just not interesting enough to warrant all these long calculating gazes from everybody. What the hell did Felix tell them before Natasha and I arrived?_

"It does make me wonder what it would be like, if I were on the other side,” Phil continued. “Miraculously alive but told not to tell anyone, I mean. On the one hand-- great! Alive! On the other….” He trailed off and shrugged, unable to find the words. “SHIELD giveth and SHIELD taketh away.” _Great. My ability to babble certainly hasn't been compromised._

Beside him, Rogers snorted, and looked down at his hands, playing with the gauntlets on his gloves. Phil’d picked up on that particular nervous gesture within the first week-- Captain America might think he was stoic and subtle, but the man wore a red-white-and-blue suit unironically. It was the only reason more people didn’t notice how easy he was to read.

“SHIELD taketh away a lot, I sometimes think.” Rogers said, his voice tight.

Phil nodded, all of a sudden feeling ancient.

“Yeah. I don't put all, or even most, of the blame on SHIELD for that one though. Felix made his choice, but so did I.”

“I suppose I was thinking mostly about the Avengers,” Rogers said, wincing a little as he realized what Phil had been talking about. "I was still on ice fifteen years ago, I won’t begin to try and figure out what happened then. But on our end, I think it would have helped to have him with us, after the Battle of New York, or at least after we took down Pierce and HYDRA. And on his end-- well. Can't be easy, being told you put together a team and now you have to pretend you're dead to them. It's a tough thing to ask of a guy."

“It is,” Phil said judiciously, pausing before he went on. “Though it's not like Marcus didn't make the same sacrifice himself at an earlier point in his career. He knew what he was asking-- and I don't suppose he _would_ have asked, if he hadn't been worried about something wrong inside SHIELD. By his account, having Felix at the Hub when it all went down was the only thing that kept HYDRA from taking control there. If they'd done that-- well, even with Stark sabotaging Project Insight, there's a chance they could have beaten you, or at least crippled SHIELD too badly to survive. Even if they hadn't been able to prevent Romanov's internet data dump remotely, they could have salvaged more than enough assets and personnel to set themselves up nicely."

Phil didn’t mention that he’d been wondering lately if HYDRA had managed that anyway. So many of the recent Avengers-level threats seemed to tie back to the corrupted parts of SHIELD from before the fall. Hall, Creel, that kid they’d fought the previous week who called himself Blizzard. Three times was quickly headed out of the realm of coincidence.

Rogers’s face twisted up like a particularly grumpy pony, and Phil figured he hadn’t liked that answer. 

“Yeah, well,” Rogers replied, “the cost was so damn high on our side, I’m starting to wonder if we shouldn't have gone all the way. Released _all_ the secret files, not just what Tony’d cleaned, taken SHIELD down along with HYDRA, when we took down Pierce at the Triskelion, and salted the earth." 

Phil swallowed his astonishment. _That_ was something Clint had never mentioned. It was almost too big to contemplate. 

“That was a possibility?” he asked, hoping Rogers didn’t notice the way his voice cracked at the end.

“That was my _plan_ ,” Rogers replied. “Take down SHIELD, not just the carriers. No salvage. Only way to get all of HYDRA.”

“What… what stopped you?” _And is there any way I can replicate it, if you ever try something like that again?_

Rogers shrugged and licked his lips, scrunching up his face like a sad puppy.

“Clint,” he said. He wasn’t really looking at anything in particular, all of a sudden-- Phil knew that look. He used to have it himself when he thought of Felix; somehow, he’d find himself staring into the middle distance as if that was where Holly had disappeared. 

“Oh?” Phil prompted.

“He, ah, nodded,” Rogers said, his voice going increasingly scratchy, “and said ‘well if that’s your plan, I’m out.’”

“Ouch,” Phil managed.

“No,” Rogers shook his head, even huffed out a weak laugh. “That part was just confusing. The ‘ouch’ part was when he asked me just how many men and women I was willing to leave behind. And then, he started… started _naming_ them. The men and women in deep cover at the moment. Out on solo assignments. The ones who'd be left hanging. Who’d be exposed and executed, who’d die without extraction teams coming for them.” 

Rogers fell silent, drawing off his gloves and flipping them over in his hand, idly running his thumb along the seams on their backs.

“And you told him… what?” It came out a whisper; Phil couldn’t have managed more.

“I don’t even remember. Something about if they were SHIELD they’d be happy to die in the service of… it doesn’t even matter.” Rogers waved the memory away with an impatient flip of his hand. “Clint didn’t bother to answer it. Just rolled his eyes and called me a drama queen.”

Phil couldn’t help it. It was _horrible_ , and his stomach felt like it had an ocean sloshing about inside it, and his head was light, and the conversation was making him want to beat his head into a wall, but he couldn’t stop himself. He felt the laughter bubble up and force its way out of his throat.

It was so very, perfectly, aggravatingly, unescapably _Clint_. No one else would have dared do it-- no one else could have made it _work_.

After a long moment, Rogers joined in Phil’s laugher, although his was half-hearted at best. 

“So call you names then walk away is a winning strategy? I'll keep that in mind.” Phil said. 

"Of course not,” Rogers huffed, still laughing against his will. “Fury was there listening to us argue. _He_ reminded me it's one thing to choose to die in the service of something, it's another to be shot in the back. I let them convince me. But now…” His face twisted again, the doubt seeping back into it, “I wonder."

"What do you think would have happened if you _had_ taken down SHIELD?" Phil asked him gently. He tried not to imagine how high the body count would have been-- or the witch hunt that would have followed without Fury and Hill and the Avengers still in place and fighting to protect the crippled agency. 

"It seems to me," Phil continued, "a lot of the same people we're fighting now would be loose in the world anyway.” 

“We might have gotten _all_ of HYDRA," Rogers said. "They’re out there now, the remnants, still causing trouble. Would have been worth it, if we could have broken its back.”

“Bullshit you would have,” Phil snapped before he could stop himself. _And there goes my brain-to-mouth filter again_. “From everything I’ve seen that organization doesn’t have a spine, it’s an invertebrate. Would have lost a hell of a lot more good men and women than you did, though." _And we might have had the same shit to deal with, and fewer resources to do it with. God, imagine the Army having to deal with Creel or with Hall or with… any of it, really._

“Yeah,” Rogers nodded. “But we might not have lost Clint. Anyway,” he looked at his glove one last time, then slid it slowly back onto his hand. “Don’t know if a slow death is much better for SHIELD.”

“It’s only a flesh wound,” Phil muttered. 

He glanced up at the odd snort from Rogers, to find him shaking his head.

“Now you _really_ sound like Clint,” Rogers said. 

It sent a flush straight up Phil’s neck and he struggled not to give anything away. _How_ did he sound like Clint? Were they taking on each other’s speech patterns? Did Rogers mean like the advice Clint would have given? Or was it the snark? 

“Hey,” Rogers nudged him with his elbow, “Don’t overthink it.”

“Right, well,” Phil sighed quietly and straightened his suit. “I suppose we’ll find out how deep the wound is, when we find out just how Felix thinks SHIELD and Quinn and this Project Centipede are tangled. Where the hell is he taking us, anyway?” 

“Oh, didn’t Tony--?” Rogers straightened up from his slouch, looking so honestly confused that Phil was nearly certain he was bluffing, “Blake says Quinn has a facility just outside Atlantic City.”

“And he thinks we can just waltz in there, or what the hell are they doing? If Quinn’s got anything illicit going on, the Avengers coming anywhere near the area is going to panic him.” Phil said, because yes, of course, Quinn had a facility just outside Atlantic City, that wasn’t news-- hell he was in the area himself, which was probably why Blake had chosen now to act. But why the hell was Rogers stalling?

“Sure,” Rogers shrugged, and stood up, stretching his considerable shoulders before looking over them at Phil, haloed by the light coming through the Quinjet’s skylight. “So we’re not going there-- not directly. It was Tony’s idea. If anyone asks, we’re doing a day trip for some team training or bonding-- ‘team retreat’ was the phrase he used, I think. He’s going to say it’s your idea, I hope you don’t mind.”

The funny thing about Captain America, Phil decided, the thing the history books never mentioned, was that he was a little _shit_.

“Where are we going?” he asked. Natasha poked her head up in the background, her face going so blank Phil knew she’d heard the strain in his voice, the desperation to not hear what he knew he was about to hear. And by the minute widening in her eyes, she was as alarmed as he was.

“This little island he owns called North Bar,” Captain America grinned. “I think you got him curious.” 

\---  
To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time:
> 
> Phil and Natasha think fast, Skye and America think faster, and the Hawkeyes think fastest of all.
> 
> Have you seen the Washed Ashore holiday ficlet on tumblr? If not, go read [A Gansett Christmas Eve](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/106176854388/washed-ashore-a-gansett-christmas-eve) right now. Hell, it'll probably help after the way I left you this chapter.
> 
> It was a near-run thing, but here we are! Washed Ashore is _back_ , baby. We’re likely looking at four more chapters to wrap up. Thank you all for your patience while the holidays failed to kill me by the narrowest of margins. Also, you all owe so much thanks to the incomparable [faeleverte](http://archiveofourown.org/users/faeleverte/pseuds/faeleverte), beta extraordinaire. She was, again, quite literally betaing a sentence or two behind me as I finished edits just now.


	21. Enemy in Sight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agent Ward meets the Conspiracy Scouts and the Avengers arrive on North Bar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: chickens used as innuendo without their full consent
> 
> This was, until this evening, only half of the chapter. The full chapter was growing even more wildly out of control with edits than it had been before, so I decided that splitting was best for the sanity of everyone involved: my beta, my readers, and myself. Given that this formerly-a-half-chapter is the length of most of the full chapters, I trust I can be excused.

**One**

_im about to do something incredibly stupid_

As texts went, it was probably the most maddeningly vague one Kate had ever received, and that included the previous champion, Billy’s _can u use lipstick on iguana lips? like is it poisonous or_. To this day, she didn’t know what had prompted that-- and didn’t _want_ to know.

Kate dropped her head and squeezed her eyes shut. The pressure behind her temples grew fast, ramping up until she finally had to hiss to keep it from whistling out of her ears in a blast of superheated steam.

“God _damn_ it, Skye,” she growled at the phone’s screen. “Not _now_ , please not fucking _now._ ” 

As she muttered, her fingers clamped down so hard on the burner phone-- a candy bar style that had to be, like, five years old-- that it spat from her hands, hitting the floor with a vicious bounce and skipping until it came to a rest under the bed.

_Oops._

When Skye’d first distributed the burner phones to everyone, just after their initial success turning Clint into Frank Barney in time for his Stark Industries debut, Kate had rolled her eyes a little. _Overkill much? Not like this is Mission Impossible or something,_ she’d thought.

She'd been new to conspiracies back then. 

From her veteran perspective as a conspiracist of several weeks’ standing, she kept finding herself muttering “where was Skye when I needed her in New York?” Then Daddy Dear wouldn't have a trespassing charge to hang over her head. 

Kate’d thought that she and America and the boys did a good job of keeping themselves on the down-low before; she’d been so damn wrong. Not that she hadn't kept secrets before, of course-- hell, the best part of her life was a secret. She’d been able to rely on official parental disinterest to keep her secrets her own, before. 

Those days were clearly over; with her Dad going for the blackout on the Father Issues bingo card lately. As she’d texted Billy (because her Dad would have expected it), after locking her in her bedroom in a freakin’ tower, she was just waiting for him to hire the dragon to lay waste to the countryside until she agreed to be eaten and be done with it. 

 

Skye had warned Kate to be careful to keep up her normal social media omnipresence so that no one realized how much of her life was spent on the iridescent purple Nokia, texting America and Doc Halliday and Skye and Hawkeye, waiting to hear about… well, about _anything_. What with all the chatter from her partners-in-creepin’, the burner phone was getting more use than her beloved Starkphone with the “I HEART ARROWS” curlicue text across the back of the lilac case. 

She wanted so badly to tell Billy and Teddy and Eli about Skye (they’d probably try to adopt her), and brag about meeting _the_ Clint Barton. Even just _hint._ It got harder and harder to talk without _talking_. So she’d queued as much shit as she could think of on yamblr-- the usual mix (she hoped) of kittens and arrows and shoe porn and stupid puns-- and tried to keep up a snarky, reassuring, presence for the boys. She’d gotten disturbingly facile at moving between one and the other, shifting her headspace between social life and espionage. 

Only America overlapped the neat compartmentalization of her life. 

America, who’d slipped in to her room on Saturday night (or very early Sunday), and pulled her back into the closet, wrapping long brown limbs around her and squeezing, until Kate felt like she could pop into another dimension just like that. Life would have been unbearable without America, and Kate was, quite clearly, the stubborn idiot her Dad thought she was, that she’d fought America for so long. Her sanity and her solace lay somewhere south of America’s cleavage line, or deep within the warm curl of her hair. 

That was the only time she’d seen America since she’d been imprisoned in her room, though, ‘cause they had a conspiracy to aid, and America was needed on North Bar. Before Kate had let America go, she made her promise not to slip Billy, Teddy, and Eli the secret “shit’s about to go down” code. Kate felt like _shit_ about it, but it had to happen.

It was a risk to them, but one Kate hoped they’d understand. As long as she played the dutiful daughter, they were safe. Safeish. Not unsafe, mostly. 

But if they got the code, Kate knew perfectly well what would happen. They’d ignore the fact that it meant _scram, vamoose, book it, every idiot for him-- or her--self_. 

No, more than likely they’d completely fail to lie low, and instead show up on North Bar and make a scene, trying to back her up.

Which would be _sweet_ and all, but also disastrous. Her Dad’d go _super_ ballistic and have everyone arrested, and bring all kinds of official attention to just who Kate’d been hanging out with down here-- and _no one needed that right now_. Or worse yet, the boys would end up mixed up in the conspiracy themselves, and Kate barely felt competent to be a conspiracist herself, much less ride herd on the three of them, too.

Basically, the burner phone had been a really great idea, thanks a ton Skye. Or it had been right up until this _very moment_.

Because just as this moment, Kate was stuck high in her tower, Phil Coulson and the Black Widow were on their way back to New York, Clint-- if the plume of greasy smoke down to the south and the recent sirens were any indication-- was off fighting an actual fire in his actual fireman’s gear (and possibly causing a few smolders with his bare arms), and America was incommunicado. 

And Skye, Skye was off doing something _incredibly stupid._

Something she’d started doing fifteen minutes ago, apparently, from the timestamp on the text.

Which left Kate no choice at all, really.

She couldn’t just let Skye go off and do something incredibly stupid on her _own_ , after all. That just… it wasn’t….

That wasn’t how things went.

Billy and Teddy and Eli would understand. 

So Kate tucked the burner phone away and put on her boots with shaking hands, and cursed the day she met Phil Coulson and Frank Barney in a dim bar. 

_Dad’s gonna disown me. After he ruins the lives of all my friends, that is. He’s gonna disown me, and lock me up, and feed me through a hole in a wall for ten years._

The worst, most guilt-inducing part of it was that she was less worried that she was about to blow up the lives of her New York friends, after all-- because Dad was _definitely_ going to be as good as his word-- than about finding an excuse she could use to get him to blow up at her that would result in her storming out in a way that would _completely not_ look to Ian Quinn like she was running off to conspire against him.

 _I suppose I could always just go with_ my girlfriend needs me _._

_Hell, Dad might be too distracted by the lesbian thing to worry about the rest of this shit._

The thought arrested Kate mid-stride as her foot caught the first glass riser.

She stared down at it, past it, gaze swooping down the long curve of the steel-and-glass staircase to the floor below. Her father was just rising out of one of the armchairs, dropping the morning paper to free his hands. There was a dark look on his face already.

Kate’s heart bottomed out, hit her stomach and kept going, till all her insides were a kludgy mess somewhere behind her diaphragm. The world whirled around her, and she gripped the handrail for a moment, before finding her footing. She took a deep breath, thought of America’s arms around her as they flew, and went.

She thundered down the stairs at a breakneck pace, hoping she’d be able to build up a head of steam before her Dad tried to brake her, praying her feet wouldn’t slip on the glass and send her flying over the rails. Hoping she could outrun the mess that was about to come out of her mouth.

_Don’t think, just do. Just do. Think later._

“What the _hell_ , Kate?” her father was saying as she flew over the last steps. His face was already thunderous, his voice buzzing like an overweight mosquito. “Where the hell are you going? Kate _stop!_!” 

She was already half past him and to the door, light-headed with adrenaline, momentum and a lack of air in her lungs carrying her on, when he grabbed her elbow and yanked.

Kate nearly spun into him. She managed to stop herself only inches short of bouncing into his belly, and tried to yank her arm back.

“Dad, please, I need to--” Wait. _Something’s missing._

“Where’s Mr. Quinn?” she asked, changing tack. She’d heard him earlier, chatting with her Dad, his voice a low syrupy ooze underneath her Dad’s whine. He was nowhere in sight now though, and her Dad narrowed his eyes at her.

“Out for the day. I told you he was here to work. What the hell do you care?”

Kate shrugged extravagantly, doing her best not to look as wild-eyed as she was feeling. 

_Aw, crap, what if Skye’s text had something to do with that?_

_That_ got her moving. She twisted her arm nearly reflexively, before her mind had a chance to think better of it and make her body _stop_. 

Her Dad growled as he pulled her back towards him. 

“You’re not going anywhere, Kate,” he said. She bit back the whine just before it slipped out of her lips.

_Excuse. You had an excuse. Say it. C’mon c’mon Kate, make your throat work._

“But Dad, I have to. It’s an emergency. My… I… She--” 

_Fuck! C’mon, c’mon, you can say it, me! It’s not like it’s gonna make him any more disappointed in you than he is already?_

They stuck, the words, just behind her teeth.

“You think long and hard about the next words coming out of your mouth, Kate,” her father told her, as if she _wasn’t_ already, as if that wasn’t the entire problem. He shook her arm gently before letting her go. 

“There. Now. Unless the ‘she’ is Emily-- who’s still asleep, last I checked-- you’re still not going anywhere on this godforsaken island.”

_C’mon Kate! This is for all the marbles. One last push._

Kate opened her mouth, felt her nose scrunch up in preparation. (She’d always hated, too, that her nose scrunched when she was concentrating. It ruined the effect. Made her look like a hamster with bangs.)

“Dad, you don’t understand, I have to go out, I--”

The doorbell rang.

At least, Kate figured out later that the ominous, rolling gong sound had been the doorbell. In the moment, she was so tense that the sound precipitated her about six inches straight upwards like a scalded cat. She landed on the balls of her feet, ready to flee. Her father stared at her, then at the door, as if she’s somehow _planned_ the interruption. 

After a long moment’s glare, he stalked over and threw it open.

Kate couldn’t see past him, so she was completely unprepared when a long, wrinkled hand pushed him aside to reveal Doc Halliday standing there, glaring at her from behind improbably large horn rim sunglasses and a stout mulberry beret.

“Kate Bishop, this is no way to behave,” Doc Halliday said.

Kate gaped, wide enough to thread a school of fish through. How the hell she’d gotten in trouble while being stuck inside, she had no idea.

“I-- hurngle?” she managed, after a moment. Her Dad, who’d been staring at her, harumphed and turned back to Doc Halliday.

“Why aren’t you already on your way?” the Doc continued, oblivious to the man with a face like a coconut-oiled badger, who was glowering at her and attempting to keep her out of his domicile.

“I… I’m grounded?” Kate replied, feeling her face heat. Doc Halliday snorted, like it was just _typical_ , Kate’d done it just to put her out, and could you even _believe_ kids these days with their smartpods and their jeggings and their lack of hat wearing in inclement weather? 

“She can’t go out without her cousin,” her Dad told the Doc. He was rewarded-- or punished-- with a glare that had been about eight decades of growing and struggling and flatulent bulldogs in the making. 

“You don’t consider the Long Beach Island Preservation Society a sufficient escort, Mr. Bishop?” Doc Halliday asked, folding her arms. Derek Bishop backed off about a half inch.

Kate saw him do it, at least-- and her eyesight was excellent, everyone said so-- but her Dad didn’t _do_ shit like that, so it was hard for her to believe she’d seen it.

“The what? Kate, what the hell is this?” he said as he turned back to her, and Kate wondered for a brief moment if he even _had_ any other dialogue. Maybe he didn’t-- maybe he had one of those see-n-say strings on his back, and would repeat the same three sentences over and over until it wound back up into his ribcage.

“Ms. Bishop was due at Ms. Jackson’s house fifteen minutes ago to discuss the upcoming budgetary meeting and review minutes. Now, Mr. Bishop--” Doc Halliday straightened and brushed off her immaculate houndstooth coat-- “will you release her into my custody?”

As it turned out, he would, though he turned red as a beet before he did.

\----

It wasn’t until they were in Doc Halliday’s car, an ancient little Volvo with kennels in the back, that Kate finally found her voice.

“Where are we going?” she asked, faintly.

“Wanda Jackson’s, like I told your father,” Doc Halliday said, face set and grim. She honked her horn as they neared an intersection, and the hunched-over little man turtling his way through it looked up, wide-eyed, and gulped. She swerved around him as she went.

“But-- but, okay, but Skye’s in trouble. I need to get down to the docks. Can’t you--”

“Wanda’s is faster,” Doc Halliday cut her off, before evidently repenting a little. She looked up briefly and patted Kate’s hand. “I got Skye's message, too. We’re going to get you to North Bar, dear, don’t worry.”

“But what does _Wanda_ have to do with it?” Kate asked, growing even fainter. What the hell had Doc Halliday been telling the woman? Or had she told her anything at all? If not, what lie was Kate supposed to feed her? Was she supposed to just slip out the back while the Doc distracted Wanda?

 _Why won’t anyone just be_ straight _with me?_

“You’re taking Wanda’s boat to North Bar, is what she has to do with it,” Doc Halliday said, taking a turn with no discernable use of the brake pedal, “and from there you’re going to get Skye out of whatever trouble she’s gotten herself into. And then provide me with a more… brief on the situation.”

“Oh,” Kate said, nearly in a whisper. Relief was turning her nearly mute. At the moment, she’d have believed Doc Halliday was haloed, the early sun was beaming so brightly on her blue haired head. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Doc Halliday snapped. “Just save them before everything comes down on our heads.”

 

**Two**

 

“Jesus, America, how hard did you hit him, anyway?”

Kate stopped outside the door to the bunker, fingers already hovering over the handle, and swallowed. After all the fuss and bother and outright panic and racing over choppy waves and then uneven terrain, now that she was here, Kate suddenly found herself developing second thoughts.

For one thing, America’d clearly gone incommunicado because she, too, had been on her way to rescue Skye.

For another, well, whatever Skye’d done didn’t sound like the kind of thing that was going to be fixed _quietly._

_Do I really want to know what I’m going to find in there?_

“Not as hard as I should have, really.” Even from the other side of the door, Kate could tell America was disgruntled. “I assumed you’d want him to be able to talk.”

“Yes.” Skye’s voice held a note of satisfaction that was utterly _terrifying._ “Yes, I think I do. Have you got that tight enough?”

“Worry about your own knots, mine are fine.”

“Look, I just don’t want him getting away--”

Definitely _time to intervene,_ Kate thought, and swung the door open.

Skye and America stood silhouetted in the light from the doorway, the one holding a roll of duct tape and the other a long length of rope. A tall, dark-haired man sprawled between them on the floor, unconscious. 

Both of them dropped so quickly from fight-or-flight into relief that Kate could almost see the adrenaline puddle on the floor around them.

“Hey Kate,” Skye started, blinking at her. “I didn’t think you were allowed out?”

“Yeah.” America narrowed her eyes, as if she was _daring_ Kate to say she’d gotten herself in trouble with her father just for something as silly as this. “How did you get past your Daddy? We gonna have a mess on our hands when we get back?”

And fuck that, even if Doc Halliday hadn’t ridden to her rescue and Kate _had_ gotten in trouble and outed herself, she had to say she thought that an unconscious man in a bunker holding contraband electronics was _definitely_ reason enough for her to make the sacrifice. 

“Doc Halliday vouched for me,” Kate mused, her mind already halfway done with the conversation. “You know, you’re doing it wrong.”

She gestured to the man’s bound wrists and ankles. America and Skye both stared at her. Kate was beginning to think she had spinach in her teeth, or an extra eye in her chin, or something.

“Oh, yeah?” Skye said, crossing her arms awkwardly, since she’d forgotten she was still holding a large roll of silver tape, “what would you suggest then?” _Princess_ , she luckily did not add, because Kate wasn’t feeling like at all at the moment.

“Hog tie him,” Kate said, hoping it came out sufficiently nonchalant. _I am good with ropes!_ She reached for the rope, pulling it out of America’s slack hands. “Here, let me show you.”

_After all these years, my skills from sleep-away camp finally turned out to be useful. Thanks but no thanks, Dad. And thanks Amber Perkins, I suppose-- though I still don’t feel sorry for punching you._

“He’s a SHIELD Agent,” Skye said, pointing to the dude as Kate looped and knotted. “So he’s probably really good at getting out of ropes and handcuffs and, like, bondage stuff. Should you maybe do that loop around the neck thing? So he can’t move without choking?”

 _A neck loop? Like, a_ noose _? Do I even know how to do that without hurting him? If he woke up like that, he’d stay still, right? He’d know not to… not to struggle? Fuck. But if he gets away-- okay, eventually either he will or we’ll have to let him go. Right?_

They all looked down at him, and America kicked him gently in the kidneys. Kate stared at her.

“Just making sure he’s still out,” she said, shrugging. She wouldn’t meet Kate’s eye, though, instead choosing to stare at the guy like she was trying to set his ass on fire with the power of her gaze. _I think I’m glad I don’t know what happened before I got here._

“I can’t believe this is our life,” Kate sighed at last, and got two grunts of agreement. 

She left out the “neck loop.” Neither of the others reminded her. 

_We’re not spies. We’re just… well, okay. Skye’s a hacker badass conspiracist, and America is something even better than a superhero. And I’m… it… fuck it. Hawkeye wouldn’t have done it._

(Of course, her stupid brain chose that moment to remind her, Hawkeye had once been Agent Barton of SHIELD, and he _had_ been a spy-- and probably something more dangerous yet. After all, what did she _think_ SHIELD used a dead-eye shot for? But that had been before he’d become an Avenger. 

And _if_ Clint-- dorky, dashing, stupidly accurate Clint-- was still the kind of guy who’d put a noose around a prisoner, well, maybe it was a sign she wasn’t entirely ready to be Hawkeye yet.

Because she couldn’t do it.)

“Urg,” said the body underneath her, and Kate shot backwards. Her heart was suddenly up somewhere behind her eyes, pounding rapidly. She barely registered being yanked backwards by her collar, and out the door.

Even hazy, the daylight was blinding after that brief period in the dark, Kate felt mole-like, blinking at Skye and America and trying to dispense the pinwheels swirling around them.

“Sorry for grabbing and yanking. He hasn’t seen you yet, and I _really_ don’t think he’s gonna remember America here.” Skye said to her. She was leaning heavily against the closed door and hugging herself tightly with both arms, her face drawn.

“No problem,” America told her, “gives us time to get things straight before we go back in.”

“Uh-uh,” Skye shook her head and straightened up, forcing her arms apart and settling them uneasily on her hips. “It’s better if you guys stay safe. I’ll… I’ll go in alone.”

“Skye--” Kate bit her lip on the rest of the protest. _It makes sense._ She tried not to feel relieved at the prospect of being kept outside, where the SHIELD Agent couldn’t see her, couldn’t somehow get word of this back to her Dad. _Toughen up, Hawkeye. This isn’t about you._ “Okay. But leave the door propped so we can back you up.”

“Yeah,” America said, looking about as unhappy as Kate felt with the course of events. (Not that Skye looked happier-- she looked like she was about to puke, and was just gonna pretend that she was perfectly in control and just fine right up until the moment she lost her lunch.) 

“Just remember--” America continued, the words tumbling off her tongue like a dam cracking open, “I can disappear the guy if it comes to that.”

Skye stared at her, mouth flopping open. Kate thought she paled a couple degrees, into something sallow and remarkably unflattering. 

Hell, Kate _knew_ what America meant, and she still felt awash in goosebumps.

“You-- we’re not gonna--”

“No, I mean I could… make him disappear. Permanently. Without killing him. If we have to.” America’s discomfort increased with each word that flopped out of her mouth, and Kate thought she’d never seen the girl at such a loss-- not even when Kate had finally gotten off her princess ass and stuck her tongue in America’s mouth for the first time, that night not so long past.

Kate wanted to fling her arms around America’s neck and kiss her again, just as desperately as she had that first time, for everything she was doing right now- the offer, the way it exposed her, the discomfort she clearly felt at the idea of marooning the man in an alternate dimension.

“Oh… okay?” Skye said, then nodded a tiny bit, half to herself, and managed to look a little less like pea soup. “I’ll... keep that in mind. Just… just in case. Thank you, America.” 

“Hey, any time,” America said, perking up as she realized Skye wasn’t going to ask for details. “Gotta have each other’s backs, right?” 

“Right,” Skye said, then she took a deep breath, and walked back into the dark.

\----

“Hello, Agent Ward, I see you’re awake,” Skye said as she entered, trying to phrase it exactly how she thought Phil would have done: casual as saying hello on a public sidewalk.

She couldn’t see that Agent Ward was awake, actually. He was lying on his side, keeping his face turned down towards the dingy concrete floor. His limbs were hanging limp as jellyfish behind him, hands and feet remarkably relaxed, even in his trussed-up state. His breathing-- so far as she could tell in the low light-- was even, shallow, dangerously controlled.

He was playing possum with admirable skill, but he didn’t fool her. 

Skye could feel his attention sharpen and focus as she came in. He didn’t open his eyes, but she could feel his gaze following her as she stepped around him (at a radius she’d judged more carefully than she had most of her coding), measuring her taking his measure. _Right, well, this is all probably old hat to him._

The instrument bank on the far wall was in front of her now, and she pulled forward the wheelie chair Clint’d sat on when he’d interrogated her, an astonishingly short number of weeks ago. Like him, she spun the chair around and straddled it, leaning over the back (and wishing she were tall enough to make it work without squashing her boobs). She’d moved the chair away from the wall, close enough to Ward’s face that he could see her feet and, if he stretched upwards, just barely see her face. The position left her retreat fairly clear, without interrupting the light falling on Ward’s face.

“So tell me,” she said brightly, “what brings a super-duper badass spy like yourself to a podunk little island like North Bar, Agent Ward? Besides a boat, I mean.”

Ward’s body convulsed once. Then again, and he sighed heavily.

Skye couldn’t be sure if it was laughter or outrage that had gotten him to abandon his simulated sleep. He rolled over onto his back, pinning his hands behind him but allowing him to stare up at her through lashes that really probably ought to have been registered as weapons. They were stupidly long and thick, and his gaze beneath them was unfairly limpid. 

_Of course, puppy eyes or not, dude was willing to choke_ me _unconscious not so long ago._

“Is that your strategy? Make lame jokes until I talk?” he asked. The warmth in his tone, the gentleness, was terrifying after how sleekly evil it had been, ghosting in her ear while he had her in a chokehold only hours before.

“Would it work?” she asked, leaning forward, letting herself smile just a half second before tucking it away. 

“No. But points for effort; it’d be less comfortable than some of the torture I’ve been through.” He sounded so damned at ease down there that she nearly called America in. 

_He thinks he has the upper hand. Shit. He probably does._

“I wouldn’t know,” she admitted, and rolled forward just a half-scootch, watching his face. “Tortured lots of people, have you?” 

It was meant to be snide, but the way his eyes darkened for half a second kind of scared her. _You have, haven’t you. Can’t imagine_ that _is SHIELD standard._ Some things she couldn’t believe of Clint, frankly, and working for an organization that would flat-out enhancedly interrogate people was one of them. 

_Of course, much of SHIELD was actually HYDRA, in disguise. Huh. Wonder how that worked out._

She could see this man being one of the snakes in the grass, even. Clint himself didn’t think SHIELD had found every single double agent.

Or, Skye supposed, she could just be hopelessly naive about what lengths an actual facts SHIELD agent might go to.

“Does that scare you?” Ward asked, catching her her hesitation. His voice had gone preternaturally smooth, gentle even. “But you’re not the one tied up in a bunker. No, you’re not used to this, are you, Skye? You’re used to doing your destruction behind the screen of a computer, right? Don’t have to see the results first-hand?”

“Like SHIELD doesn’t,” she said, shifting just a little in her chair. “Like you guys care whose lives you ruin, what happens to the people you disappear. You think we don’t see what you’re doing? That’s why we do our work, the Tide-- bringing up all the shit you want hidden, letting the world see who you really are.” 

It was the Tide’s version of an elevator speech, really, she didn’t even think about it anymore.

“I’m not the one hiding things, Skye,” he said to her, still in that even tone. “That’s you. Hiding me, hiding these crates. Do you honestly think that Ian Quinn is a good guy? Who do you think he’s planning on spying on, anyway? What do you think he’s planning to do with all that? Save the world? Not in any way _you_ would like.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Skye snapped back, hoping he couldn’t see how pale her face had gone. 

All her blood had rushed from it into her limbs, and her entire body was tugging her, desperate to run. _Out! Get out already!_

“Let me go, Skye, and I’ll show you. Maybe we can work something out, before my boss finds me. Only way you’re going to be safe.” The asshole was pretty much purring now, those big eyes so sincere they were practically kawaii, and Skye felt a stab of irritation at him for it. 

“Before your boss finds you?” she repeated, pushing extra bravado into it, trying to imitate Kate Bishop. “How’s he gonna do that? You can’t transmit _anything_ from in here.”

“You think I’m going to tell you?” he said, amused now. “But he’s coming. Time’s wasting. Tick tock, Skye. Think about it.”

His face was so open, so calm and rational, as he lay there helpless on the floor, that Skye wondered for a moment if he’d managed to poison her somehow, and was waiting for her to fall over.

“Yeah,” she said, and stood, “yeah I will.” As she went out the door, she heard him laughing.

\----

Skye closed the door behind her with a snick, and Kate saw her hand was shaking. She was so pale under her bangs that she could have been a black and white ink drawing. 

“Did you hear all that?” she asked, a hushed whisper. 

Kate shrugged and gave a temporizing hand waggle. She and America had crowded as close to the doors as they dared, listening, but they’d lost half of it. (Anyway, America’s breath hot across Kate’s neck, her body strong and shifting at Kate’s back, had been more than a little distracting.)

“Not enough,” America said, for both of them.

“Someone’s looking for him-- or at any rate he wants me to think that,” Skye told them, reaching up to massage the back of her neck, and stilling herself with an effort. “But that’s not what worries me most. He tried to convince me he thinks we’re working with Ian Quinn.”

“Fuck,” Kate said, because the thought was enough to make her nauseous. “As if.” 

Although… if it came right down to it… Quinn _was_ staying at her father’s house. With her father. And her. To say it looked bad would be an eentsy understatement. _How the hell do we ever prove we’re not? "Nope, Dad's just a normal rich guy jerk, and I'm mostly being blackmailed by him" is not the best defense ever._

“That's _still_ not the part I’m most worried about,” Skye said, crossing her arms in front of herself and squeezing. Kate felt her stomach sink further-- it was gonna hit her knees real shortly. “What worries me is that he _knew_. What Quinn was keeping in the crates. He knew.”

“So?” America said, and Skye looked up, her eyes bleak with worry.

“He hadn’t gotten a chance to dig into them before I got there. How did he know? _How did he know what he was looking for?_ Guys….”

“Oh, holy shit.” Kate fought as the wave of vertigo hit her, the world tilting on its axis. “ _He’s_ working with Ian Quinn, too?”

“I… I think so,” Skye said. “But if he is, is he working with Agent Triplett? Or not? Whose side is he on? And just how high in SHIELD does this go?” She heaved a sigh. “See, _this_ is why we need Clint! I don’t know what to do with this. I was barely holding my own in there. But we can’t keep him long. If someone is coming to look for him, we gotta get him _off_ the island-- fast.”

She was carefully not looking at America as she said it. 

Kate reached back and grabbed America’s hand, squeezing it once, and felt America cling for just a moment.

It wasn’t like they didn’t already know Skye _suspected_ that America could do some freaky cool shit. She’d had to have been blind not to, especially when Kate and America were covering ground over the Jersey coast faster than any boat could safely travel. Skye'd never once asked them about it-- part of whatever arcane truce she and America had forged during their long hours waitressing, maybe. 

America was pretty tough about most things, but it’d taken her months even to let Billy and Teddy and Eli know she was more than just a beautiful girl packing a mean punch. When she finally _had_ started to open up, Kate had understood why immediately-- the kind of backstory she had could get her disappeared either to a mental institution or a secret government agency. America wouldn’t thrive either place-- she was perfectly stable (okay, mostly stable-- her only sign of insanity was wanting to date Kate). She just happened to have genuine real-for-real superpowers, and none of the privilege that came with being an alien god from another dimension, or a government-created supersoldier, or anything like that.

Kate wasn’t about to press her to try opening up, not given that, and she’d been grateful to Skye for keeping her mouth shut too.

_We might not have a choice soon, though. We’ve got a government agent hogtied in a bunker, and if anyone finds him it’s gonna look real bad._

When put like that, the play was obvious, really. Neither Skye nor America were gonna like it-- Kate didn’t herself-- but that was turning out to be about par for the entire fucking situation.

“You’re right,” Kate decided. Skye looked up at her, blinking. She took a deep breath and tried to look certain of herself. “We need Clint. He’ll know what to do. You two go and get him. I’ll stay here, in case Agent Ward decides to come out and play.”

“But--” Skye began, but she was cut off by America’s growl.

“Why _you_?” she said, spinning Kate to face her. “Kate, this man is dangerous.” Kate fought the urge to kiss that look off her face-- to smooth the fear from her eyebrows and the anger from the corners of her lips. To tug her hair until her forehead unwrinkled. 

“Exactly. Skye’s not good with projectile weapons. She’d have to get too close to take him down. I could take him out without him ever seeing me.”

She’d already won, after all-- they both agreed it was time to bring in the big guns. The rest was just details, but she was determined to have it her way. She set her jaw and hoped America could read the apology in her eyes.

“All right,” America conceded, though she looked mulish. “I can see that. But I’m staying.”

“You’re going,” Kate said softly. “Because the faster you get Skye there? The faster you all can come back with Clint-- and the faster I’ll be safe.”

_And because if you stay, you might get in trouble-- you might expose yourself to him. And I’d never forgive myself if you had to do that because of me._

\----

America argued with Kate for the entire time it took Skye to run to the cottage for her laptop, and come back with that and Kate’s bow and quiver. At that point, America gave up arguing with words and just glared at Kate, before stalking over to her and kissing her soundly.

“Don’t do anything stupid, chica,” she whispered, “not without me.”

“When have I ever done anything stupid, except you?” Kate whispered back, and felt America collapse into unwilling laughter against her. When she pulled back, it was to give Kate the kind of stare that caused telenovela cameramen to pan in for the super-close-up. Kate could read entire universes in it. 

Then she groped Kate’s rear end, and let go.

Kate was still dazed, stars in her eyes, when America left, holding tightly onto Skye. 

It was lonely on the island, with them both gone. North Bar seemed to expand and contract at once-- the bare, stunted trees closing in so tightly, the rustling in the underbrush growing so close, that she felt like a mime whose box was slowly shrinking. 

At the same time, she had the sudden sense that she was on the vast edge of the world, alone, and that Skye and America and everything she cared about were gone for good, leaving her alone with _that man_ , that… _psycho_ who’d attacked Skye. Who probably knew Ian Quinn. Who wore a badge and probably had the authority to throw her straight into that Freezer place Clint talked about sometimes when he thought they were all about to do something especially stupid.

Like now, for instance.

From her hiding place behind a low stand of beach plum, Kate counted seconds, then the beat of her heart, then the distant crash of waves on the shore. Her bow was trained on the bunker’s door, and she squinted with the effort of concentration. 

Every other moment she thought she saw it shake and start to creak open. Time stretched even thinner than it had when she’d been trapped, exiled in her room. Was that really only a few hours ago-- or eons?

And then a soft whoosh overhead, a little thumping thrum, made Kate look up, and she knew time had run out.

There was an odd shimmer in the air, like something huge rippling underneath a bedsheet, only the bedsheet was the sky. The sound increased, redefined itself, took on a mechanical, aeronautical hum-- and disappeared over the short treeline, headed towards the mansion.

Kate took off at a run, all thought of Agent Ward forgotten.

The shimmering had settled, was hovering just above the dying grass on the lawn in front of the mansion and scorching the earth beneath it. It creaked, shivered, stilled. The thrum of engines, the hiss of flames, died away. 

With something like the shake of a wet dog, the shimmer disappeared, leaving a sleek silver jet sitting on the front lawn of North Bar’s house, surrounded by hibernating rose bushes. 

After a long moment, the back hissed open, dropping a cargo ramp, and Phil Coulson stepped out. His suit was immaculate, his eyes shaded by sunglasses, and he looked around as if he was exactly where he’d meant to be.

Which had to be a huge fucking lie, but he wore it well.

He was followed closely by another man in a suit, sleek and weasel-like; then by Captain America in all his red white and blue glory; and the Black Widow in all hers, red-haired, slim-waisted, deadly. Crowding behind them both was Tony Stark wearing some kind of Tron underarmor (or a futuristic union suit, maybe), with a suitcase in his hand; and another man, this one looking normal and nervous, and wearing sweatpants. 

Kate pulled out her little purple burner phone, thanked Skye under her breath yet again, and began to thumb in a text.

 

**Three**

 

Phil stepped off the Quinjet onto the blasted lawn and tried to hold back his curse. _Grass is hard enough to grow out here without Stark landing a goddamn jet on it at a whim._ He was going to have to re-seed when spring rolled around-- unless Clint got to it first.

 _If either of us are still_ here _come spring. Which does seem unlikely at this point._

He was suddenly acutely aware that this might be the last time he ever set foot on North Bar. Fear stabbed at him, shocking as being dunked in the winter ocean.

“Well,” Felix said, coming up next to him and taking a deep breath of the sea air, “so this is where you ran off to.”

Phil’d imagined Felix on North Bar, miraculously alive, once or twice at the very beginning of his stay, but he’d never managed to make it at all believable. After all, he’d come to the island in the first place to lay the man’s ghost to rest. Now that Felix was here, Phil found he wanted nothing more than to push the man straight back onto the jet, lift the ramp by main force if necessary, and send him packing.

“Mm,” Phil said, and closed his eyes, taking in his own breath. The astringent tang of salt and cold weather filled his lungs, scouring him clean. There was a faint hint of smoke on the air-- not a shock, given the scene they’d flown over on Long Beach Island on their way in, the long plume of soot drifting off down the island. 

The Avengers themselves had barely noticed the little fire, beyond the time it took to make sure that it was being handled. Phil’s worry for Clint, and for whoever’s home or livelihood was burning to the ground, was cut a little with relief that there was no way Stark or Blake or anyone could ask to see Frank Barney now.

Being tangled up at ground zero of a fire is a pretty good excuse for not putting in an appearance.

 _Skye._

The thought hit him with the force of a sudden gale. She was on the island somewhere. 

_Oh please be hiding back at the cottage like a rational person._

Behind him, the Avengers were sorting themselves out. Phil tried to track them without opening his eyes: Natasha wandering the perimeter of the clearing with more than idle intent (hopefully searching for errant girls or chickens or Luckys and shooing them away); Captain America off to the right, probably facing the mansion; Dr. Banner and Stark, carrying his suit in a briefcase and dressed only in his underarmor, just stepping off the Quinjet.

One last breath, this one dragged up from the very roots of the island, flickering up through his feet into his lungs, taking all the frantic energy that had flared in him when Captain America had mentioned where they were going, so very few minutes ago. Phil felt himself settle on the exhale as his ribcage slid back into place, North Bar doing its good work even in the face of a passel of unexpected Avengers. The sound of the waves on the shore came faintly to his ears.

“Hey, I haven’t been here since Mom and Dad d-- since I was a kid,” Stark remarked, and Phil opened his eyes and turned reluctantly to face the owner of North Bar. “It’s looking good, Coulson,” he said, with a little half-manic smile in Phil’s direction. Phil nodded back.

“It’s… nice,” Dr. Banner agreed. He stood nearly as still as Phil had, drinking in the island. Captain America echoed his sentiment, but not the posture. If anything, he looked slightly stiffer than he had a moment ago. 

“Hey, where’re all your chickens? Don’t you keep chickens? I remember Pep saying something about chickens to me, you had to get a permit or something.” Stark was only half paying attention to Phil, wandering idly away from the jet instead, on a trajectory that would eventually bring him in conjunction with Natasha.

“I keep them at the cottage,” Phil replied, ignoring Felix’s smirk. 

_You’re giving yourself away, Felix. You should have been surprised at the chickens._

He was quite certain that, whatever else Felix had expected him to do with his life, fifteen years ago, he had not expected _poultry._

“Well, I want to meet them,” Stark told him, turning petulant. 

“I didn’t think we’d be here long; there’s no time for chickens,” Phil replied patiently, trying to hide his own growing sense of dismay. Stark was starting to ham it up-- that was never a good sign.

 _No, we definitely aren’t introducing you to the chickens, especially not by name, since they were so clearly named by a man who you think is dead and possibly betrayed you. And doubly not since you might find a Skye hiding amongst them. No, best to keep her and Clint out of this ‘till we have proof to clear his name._

Felix looked back at him, so guileless Phil _knew_ he was sizing Phil up. 

“Aw come on. I bet Nat got to see the chickens. Hey, Nat,” Stark reached out and poked her. Natasha spun hard, coming around in a defensive pose-- already more than half the Black Widow, her gear complete and her headspace nearly so. “You got to see Agent’s cocks, didn’t you?” 

It took Phil a moment to realize that was an innuendo. Natasha caught it first, because she glared at Stark. So did Captain America, and even Dr. Banner. Felix just did his inscrutable thing, and wandered off for the mansion, looking like he wasn’t looking for anything.

“I did meet Coulson’s flock,” Natasha told Stark. “They’re all hens. And I really don’t think you could handle his chickens.” 

“Nat!” Stark said, scandalized, then sent a sidelong glance at Rogers. Captain America just glared back at him-- entirely deservedly-- and then turned his disapproval on Phil.

Which was goddamn unfair, Phil hadn’t taken any part in that exchange, why the hell was Rogers-- oh. Right.

 _So I’m not good enough for the Black Widow? She can’t take care of herself?_ Phil thought, before catching himself. 

Good _god_ that was the last thing in the world anyone either needed or wanted. Natasha was probably even less interested in it than he was, especially after Clint had inflicted babble about Phil’s toes on her. Still, they’d both tacitly accepted that this was going to be the most likely explanation at least some of her teammates would come up with for her weekend spent on the island, and she hadn’t balked.

“Now that we’re here,” Phil said, attempting to draw them back to him and away from their wanders all over his island, in search of who knew what, “would someone mind filling Ms. Romanov and myself in on the conversation that happened _before_ we got to Avenger’s Tower this morning? And how being here is going to help us take down Ian Quinn?”

Using North Bar as an innocuous stopover on their way to Quinn’s base of operations made sense, if that base was anywhere in the Barnegat Bay, as Skye suspected. This little playlet, being produced, he thought, primarily for his benefit, was starting to go further and further south. He tried not to compare himself to Hamlet’s uncle.

_Well I haven’t poisoned anyone or married anyone’s mother, anyway._

“Phil?” Felix’s voice drifted back over from the far side of the lawn, just down the little dip behind the mansion. Natasha’d been headed there until Stark distracted her. “Since when do you do archery?”

 _Oh, fuck._

Phil didn’t even have to look at Natasha to know she was echoing his thoughts. _Please let them have at least pulled the arrows out of the butts._ Because there was no way he could convince any of them that he had the kind of skills Clint and Kate had with a bow.

_Which is less dangerous, claiming to be the archer myself and being asked to demonstrate, or reminding everyone that Frank Barney exists, and blaming it on him? If I’ve got any luck at all today, it’s that Felix is focusing everyone’s attention on me and Natasha._

“Holy shit!” Stark’s voice came floating back, and Phil knew his prayer had not been heard. “Look at this! Cap, come on! Bruce, get over here. Coulson who the hell-- Nat, have you seen this?”

They all bowed to the inevitable and rounded the edge of the Quinjet, headed down the hill towards Stark’s voice.

He and Felix were flanking one of the stumps, both of them staring at two arrows transfixed in the very center, one split in half by the other. Felix was wide-eyed and his lips had dropped open. While Phil watched, he licked them and shut his mouth with a snap. He was showing as much shock as Phil had seen from him since they’d received their discharges way back in the last century. If the situation hadn’t been so precarious, Phil would have taken some satisfaction from it.

As it was, Felix knew Clint and his style far too well for Phil to feel anything but panic. Even while Phil had that thought, Felix reached out to run his fingers up and down the two arrows, and then look up at Natasha, looking for some kind of recognition in her face. Her hair hid her face from Phil, but Felix must not have found anything he was looking for there-- he turned to stare directly at Phil.

_I wonder if he can read me right now as easily as I can him?_

Stark, meanwhile, was shaking his head.

“This isn’t you, Coulson,” he said, his voice gruff. He’d lost almost all of his normal manic lilt; Phil could practically see the equations forming and adding themselves up behind his eyes. “You couldn’t do this. Hell, Steve and Nat couldn’t do this. Most Olympians will tell you this is impossible. This is… this is _Hawkeye_ level skill. Am I wrong?”

He turned to Natasha and Rogers. Rogers nodded his head, looking a little lost, extremely young, and a little haunted, as if he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye, gone before he could turn. Something that might have been a ghost or might have been a sheet. Phil knew that look intimately.

“You’re not wrong, Tony,” Rogers said. “That’s exactly what Clint used to do. He used it to win bar bets with other archers; said it was only good as a trick, but as tricks went it was a trump. Coulson, explain this. Now.”

Phil opened his mouth, hoping he could sort out the least destructive response of his options: _this girl from the island_ , _my conveniently-timed cousin-- who you can’t meet_ , or even _yep, you got me; I’m Hawkeye_ , before it came out of his mouth.

As his lips formed the first syllable, an arrow whistled past him. It thunked into the bullseye right between Stark’s spread fingers.

“Holy shit!” Stark said, whipping his hand away and staring at it. “That is such a fucking jackass move. That has to be--” He looked up at Natasha, practically radiating _tell me I’m not crazy._

Natasha shrugged.

“Hawkeye!” Stark called, spinning around and squinting into the brush, “No use hiding, if you’re just gonna do that. Come out, damn it, do you want an engraved invitation? Because I can do that, but the Quinjet doesn't have a printer. It's an oversight, but--”

“I hate rsvping anyway,” Kate Bishop said as she stepped into the clearing, her golden bow swinging loosely from one hand and her quiver slapping the hip opposite. “What do you want?”

 _Yeah Clint,_ Phil thought, as affection spread warmly through his ribcage, _you’re right. She’s perfect._

"Who the hell are you?" The incredulity in Stark’s tone was far more satisfying to Phil than it really should have been,

"I’m Hawkeye," Kate replied, shouldering her bow and glaring back at him with as much wounded dignity as her teenage frame could muster.

\----

Kate had known she would have to do it from the moment she’d heard the intense guy in the suit say the word “archery.” 

_Okay. This looks bad._

Yeah, she knew. That didn’t mean she wasn’t hoping, as she crouched in the bushes watching the Avengers, Phil, and Suit Guy crowd around the stumps, that by some miracle Phil’s mouth would open and something plausible would pour from it. Something that would explain it all away without bringing her into it. Shit, without bringing “Frank Barney” into it, and inevitably compromising Clint.

If only Phil could think of something, anything, that would mean she didn’t have to expose herself, that she could stay hidden here on North Bar instead of risking her presence on the island getting back to her Dad. 

_I should have told America to tell the boys to bug out. Dad’s gonna go apocalyptic at this. I should have had America stay here, gone with Skye myself. Taken the boat or something. That would have gotten the boat off the island, that would have been smart. Slower. Maybe too slow. But smart._

Except that if she’d done that-- the smart thing-- and gone off with Skye, she wouldn’t have _been_ here, now, to do what she knew she had to do.

It was her fault, kinda: she and Clint had been so damn stupid and hadn’t cleared the butts after their last practice, just before her father arrived and it all went to shit. She’d left in such a hurry to find America, and he’d had so much work to do on the surveillance system, that they’d saved clean-up for later. Then the Black Widow had shown up on Long Beach Island, and there was no later.

Still, the situation would have been salvageable if Clint hadn’t done that stupid Robin Hood trick again, probably just to mock her, though he _said_ it was so she could see how it was done, if she ever needed to do it. 

So there it was, plain as day, the trick split arrow, Clint’s calling-card, sticking out from Stark’s fingers. 

_Please. Please just turn and go away. I can’t do this, no one’s gonna believe it. Don’t make me. Oh god, I’m not ready for this after all._

And then Kate heard Stark mention the name “Hawkeye,” and she stood and fired.

In the end, that had been all there was to it. She felt no hesitation at all in the moment, not even as she stepped out into the clearing and told Iron Man that _she_ answered to that “Hawkeye.”

Start was staring at her now, this odd discombobulated but shrewd look on his face. It worked well with his pirate goatee and general manner, but it was also disconcertingly hot. Kate had never seen him up close, though they’d attended the same society ordeals on occasion. What a weird time to finally come face-to-face with the man.

“Bullshit,” Stark said after a little, and turned back to Phil, as if he was going to reintroduce some sanity to the conversation. “Who the hell is this?”

“Hawkeye,” Phil told him firmly, and Kate fought not to wrap her arms around his neck and _kiss_ him for it. “The Hawkeye of the Met. Didn’t you pay attention to the news at the time? She prevented a robbery, using Clint Barton’s bow. Under the circumstances, I think she earned the name.”

“Nope, nope, nope,” Stark responded, growing darker with every moment. “That doesn’t explain where the arrows came from. I can buy you’re good, girl, but you’re not _that_ good.” He was pointing at the split arrow, drawing his finger along the fletching.

Kate had to agree with him, much as it pained her. She hoped she kept her face impassive enough as she shrugged at him, conveying _I don’t care what you think_ rather than _aw fuck._

“I only know one person who was that good,” he continued, “ and _he_ owned the name Hawkeye, not you. Not just because you stole his bow.”

“Borrowed,” Phil murmured, and received another glare for the interruption.

“ _Temporarily_ stole,” Stark amended himself. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that Hawkeye disappeared around here.”

 _Yes, he certainly did that,_ Kate winced, not daring to look at Phil for help. Was he also wondering when someone was going to mention the name Frank?

“Died, you mean.” That was the other man in a suit, the man with the silver hair and the dark dark eyes. He seemed _very_ certain about it, and also very calm, smooth and crisp like origami-- much like Phil, come to think of it. When Phil turned to glance at him, however, both of them crumpled just a tad. 

“We thought,” Stark snapped, and he was tapping the arrows now, so clearly processing that Kate thought for a moment she could see the little loading bar above his head. “But maybe we were wrong.” 

“I told you, it was me,” Kate said, gulping down everything in her that was screaming it _wasn’t_.

“This?” Stark pulled at the arrows. “This was you? Then _prove_ it.”

_Prove it._

No good _ever_ came of saying that to her.

Of course, it was supposed to be impossible. Even after Kate’d seen Clint _do_ it, she’d still expected it to be a trick, all done with mirrors and misdirection. 

But it was real enough. Over and over he’d shown her, trying to drive it into her brain, taunting her.

And now?

 _I’m no hero, or I wouldn’t be hiding here. America, she’s a hero. Clint is. Hell, even Phil, the jerk. He’s a hero, too, even if he thinks he just hangs around with--_ she glanced back over at him, at that thought, and found him watching her patiently, his face impassive and his eyes deep and kind. 

Waiting for her lead.

_Oh._

“Hrmph,” Kate said, and began walking backwards, nearly to the ring of trees.

Her first arrow was still there in the target, teasing Kate with its gaudy purple fletching.

Kate brought her bow up, nocked another arrow, and narrowed in on it the vivid end of her target. 

_Hawkeye would make that shot_. She heard Clint’s words echo in her brain, and felt her lips curve in a smile.

 _Maybe I will_ , she thought.

She released.

Everyone was still watching her; only the thwick and crack as the arrow hit home turned their gaze. 

It had hit its mark, splitting the first arrow neatly in two.

_Ho. Lee. Shit._

“ _I’m_ Hawkeye,” she said, raising her chin and turning back to Stark, letting the adrenaline carry her along. “Someone has to be, and the other one is gone.”

She risked a glance at Phil again, but had to look away quickly. The pride on his face, so naked it was almost NSFW, was too much to bear.

“I--” Stark said, staring from the arrow, to her, then back. He did this several times before Captain America (and seriously-- Captain America!) intervened, with a hand on his arm. 

“It’s okay, Tony,” Steve Rogers said. “I look for him everywhere, too. Even though I know he’s nowhere.”

Oh god, the ragweed. The late ragweed. The really hardy frost-proof invisible ragweed that was getting in her eyes. Kate fought not to lift a finger to her suddenly heavy eyelashes.

“So what are you doing _here_?” Rogers asked her gently, and her tears-- and throat-- dried up. Kate swallowed once, twice, and finally found her voice.

“I come to practice here. Phil lets me,” she gestured at Phil, who shrugged in corroboration. 

“All this is very nice,” the Black Widow broke in, when Stark opened his mouth to say more, “but we have a mission on our hands at the moment, and Fury could decide he cares about it at any time.”

Released from scrutiny, Kate let her shoulders fall and sent a silent but fervent _thank you_ in the Widow’s direction. She’d dreaded having to explain in detail.

“Agent Blake,” the Widow said, nodding to the sharp man in a suit, “Tony, you two made the plans. What do we need to do here?”

“Chiefly,” Blake said, looking over them all and tugging the edges of his suit straight, “we need the most private place you can think of to talk in, and then we need to hope none of us is bugged.”

“Nah,” Stark drawled, and Kate felt her stomach fall. “We just need the first part, the second will take care of itself.”

He seemed so casual, she was certain he had something up his sleeve. _No, god no, don’t mean what I think you mean._

Stark was clearly not paying attention to her telepathic pleas, because he was already leaving the target area, waving impatiently. 

“C’mon. I haven’t been here in years, but I know the map pretty well. There’s a research bunker down that way, on the shore, right Coulson? We bug-proofed a couple years back, part of the last general security overhaul. No one can transmit from there-- or to there, either. And by the time a passive device could be retrieved we’ll be long gone. Will that do?”

“Yes, that should do very well,” Blake said. The two of them headed off, leaving the other Avengers to trail.

Kate barely had time to give Phil a look of _horror_ before she was swept up and dragged along with them.

 

**Four**

 

As they started the trek through the scruffy bushes towards the bunker, Phil watched Kate’s face fall briefly into the same look he imagined she’d have if someone broke her bow, and he had a brief moment’s panic. 

_Oh god, what fresh hell is this?_

Leaves crunched under their feet as they passed down the narrow path in single file. Phil walked in front of Natasha and behind Captain America (and the frustratingly distracting planes of his back and his, well-- whoever’d engineered that suit had a fetish. That was all Phil had to say about that), trying to maintain an air of nonchalance completely at odds with the hurricane currently raging in his stomach.

Kate was behind Natasha and just in front of Dr. Banner-- he couldn’t get another look at her, but he heard her footsteps lag and stumble, heard her mutter that really, she didn’t need to be here, she should get back to LBI before her father… worried. Banner murmured back that she’d be fine, that Cap could fix things with her father.

“Why are they bringing her?” Natasha asked, as she stumbled a little over a branch and rocked forward into Phil, buying them half a moment’s grace. 

_“They,”_ Phil repeated in his head, obscurely comforted. 

There was no time to answer her, because Cap looked back to see if she was all right. Even if there had been time, though, none of the answers Phil _could_ think of were good. 

_SHIELD knows about Kate and America and Skye-- Triplett told them. He must have made this call. So what does Felix Blake think he needs with Kate?_

That was what gave him the warning, such as it was. 

Kate Bishop’s appearance had obviously not been a part of whatever plans Blake and Stark and Rogers had made, but once in their sphere, they weren’t letting her go-- Blake and Stark especially. Those two were the ones who’d gone deep-diving into SHIELD’s and Quinn’s files-- and the two more convinced that Clint _had_ done something wrong, whether by intent or accident. 

Phil’s gut had been right back at that Tower-- this wasn’t just finding a quiet place to stage their assault on Quinn’s warehouse. They smelled something off with him, and they thought it smelled like Ian Quinn. He was under close scrutiny.

Which meant Kate-- and Natasha, who’d just spent a weekend with him on the island-- were suspect as well. _And Frank Barney-- thank god for small fires, and I hope whoever it was had good insurance._

Phil let his eyes drift closed long enough to take another fortifying breath of salt air, his feet steady on the path they’d known so long. 

So long as Kate let him handle it, they might manage to bring this off yet. Natasha would stay her hand-- she’d knew as well as he did what would happen if she tried to say anything. 

The implicit suggestion they’d been sleeping together would become explicit, and even less funny than it had been when wrapped around inappropriate jokes about his chickens. It would become a reason to discredit her, and the _only_ effective response she could make would implicate Skye and Frank. Whether she believed him or not, Natasha would stay silent-- she’d risk them both before she’d let Clint down one hair's breadth. 

So Phil would handle this, this whatever-it-was that was about to happen. And then they could get on with the real job-- the finding Ian Quinn job, and screwing out of Felix just exactly how Quinn and Project Centipede and the plot to discredit Clint all wound around each other. 

Assuming that Felix actually knew anything.

But why had Kate looked so terrified?

_Idiot. The crates. She’s worried about the crates._

Of course she was-- now that Phil remembered them, _he_ was worried about the crates, too. But how would they know those came from Ian Quinn’s yacht? And if they did know, somehow… the explanation for their presence was both true and benign.

Time collapsed in on itself until they were standing in front of the bunker and Stark was staring down at the lock, his body blocking it from Phil’s view.

“What-- why isn’t there a biometric scanner or something on this?” he asked, turning back to Phil.

“Because that would make people wonder what was inside it. You had one put on; after the third time someone broke in I took it off. Two of them were rival companies, one was just a drifter. I reported it to Ms. Potts. Haven’t had any problems with intruders since I went to something less conspicuous.” 

_Except the one, thanks, Skye._

“Well, there’s a problem now,” Stark grumbled, and pushed the door open.

Felix, who had crowded up behind him, went stock still and then pushed forward fast, shoving Stark out of the way in his hurry to get inside. Stark and Rogers glanced at each other, and then followed him in, jostling each other with elbows and shoulders as they hit the door, looking like a comedy skit for a moment until they both folded in enough to push through.

The day was silent for a moment, as if the entire island was holding its breath, waiting for them. Even the sound of the waves, so very close on the other side of the dune, seemed strangely muted.

“Agent Coulson, get in here. Nat, bring him in.” Roger’s voice dripped with every one of the seventy years he’d spent on ice, and Phil felt the chill radiate so far it entered his own heart.

Natasha grabbed his elbow, gave him one sideways glance that he didn’t have the leisure to interpret, and pulled them both through the door and into the darkness.

Vaguely, from the open door behind him where the world was still going on, Phil registered Dr. Banner putting a heavy hand on Kate’s shoulder. 

“Wait with me,” he said gently, although it was definitely not a request.

“Oh,” Phil said, when his eyes had adjusted properly to the dim light.

There wasn’t much more _to_ say, after all, in response to finding a man hogtied on the floor of your bunker.

Your employer’s bunker. 

The bunker that you are supposed to keep secure on behalf of your employer, who is standing right next to the man tied up on the floor of his property.

The very familiar-looking man….

 _Jawbones. That’s Jawbones._  
Phil felt light-headed, thoughts skirling through his brain and dissipating into the atmosphere. 

One stuck: _Well, it does explain what had Kate acting like a baby rabbit._

“Agent Ward,” Felix was saying, and he was already on his knees, sawing the man free and then helping him to his feet. “What happened?”

“Girl…” Jawbones-- Ward-- said, swaying lightly for a moment and half-collapsed over the shorter Felix. His voice was rough and slightly dazed, as if he’d been unconscious. _I didn’t think we had anything on the island to dose him with?_

“Girl?” Felix asked, and Phil watched them all look towards the open door-- hell, he looked himself. Kate and Dr. Banner had disappeared from the open doorway, though he imagined their voices were still audible outside. “Brunette?”

“Yeah. Packs a taser. And a punch. Name of Skye. You remember, sir-- the hacker we missed in California. Rising Tide.” Ward looked up at Felix, then, and Phil felt the urge to rabbit come on himself, too. 

(He also felt the urge to strangle Ward for so much as laying a _hand_ on Skye, but that urge was equally as unproductive as the other.) 

“I remember. What was she doing here?” Felix helped him straighten up as he talked, and dusted him off gently.

“You were right, sir,” Ward said, with maddening vagueness.

“Right about what?” Stark’s voice broke the silence. 

Phil noted, idly (not really idly, not at all, though he would go on _pretending_ it was till the day he… couldn’t…) that Captain America had moved to stand between him and the door.

The flashback to the caves around Orlat this time was all the more intense for having Felix standing so near him.

_At least there’s no cheese this time. Small goddamn favors._

“We’ve got the girl,” Rogers added by way of reassurance. “She’s outside. Dr. Banner’s with her. What was Agent Blake right about?”

Ward looked up at Felix, seeking permission and getting it with a brief nod of the head, before he started speaking. 

He was just as subtly wrong underneath his smooth exterior as he’d been the first time Phil’d met him, sauntering towards him in the twilight. Coming from Phil’s own cottage, stepping foot on Phil’s own docks.

Phil had a moment to think that, of the two of them, he’d take his Skye over Felix’s Ward any day of the week, before Ward’s words made him focus.

“Those crates,” Agent Ward was saying, as he walked over to them and opened one, “they’re full of electronics embedded with listening devices, unregistered phones, remote cameras--”

“Spy stuff,” Stark broke in, and Ward nodded, rubbing at his chafed wrists absently.

“Spy stuff-- not anything I recognized either. There’s other cargo, too. Those crates fell off Ian Quinn’s yacht during that storm back in early September. My CO--” he nodded at Blake-- “has had me looking for them, on the side and between our other missions, ever since.” 

“This was part of your investigation?” Rogers asked Felix, and he nodded, his glance cutting quickly to Phil and back. The whites of his eyes flashed in the darkness-- far too familiar to Phil from night ops and other covert operations they’d conducted under cover (and sometimes under cover of darkness). 

“Yes,” Felix said. 

And that was it, the prickling of hairs raising on the back of Phil’s neck told him. He could feel Natasha stiffening at his side, because she too knew when a trap was about to snick shut. 

“Damnit, Phil,” Felix sighed.

“I didn’t exactly ask to have covert agents knocked out and locked in my bunker,” Phil snapped back, just to let it play out. 

_Though good work, Skye. Horrible timing, but good work._

“That’s yet to be seen,” Felix responded, letting go of his agent to step forward into Phil’s space. He ducked his head, for all the world looking like he was merely curious, just asking academic questions. “But why’d you do it?”

“Why’d I do what?” Phil asked, because he was _going_ to make Felix accuse him of something, damnit, before he started trying to excuse himself. No use digging himself in deeper, offering explanations to questions no one had thought of yet. He’d learned that lesson long before he’d gone, still a little dewy-eyed, into the Rangers.

“Agent Coulson,” Rogers said quietly, and he was surprisingly un-equine. Not angry, then. Instead, he looked… disappointed. It lent him a kind of classical elegance that only exaggerated the effect. It ought, Phil thought wildly, to have been banned by the Geneva Convention on sheer principle. “Agent Blake told us his suspicions, before you and Nat made it back to the Tower this morning. And this? Confirms them.”

“Confirms _what_?” Natasha asked, her voice even, almost unconcerned. It steadied Phil, absurdly. 

“It confirms what I’d feared, Natasha,” Felix said, and he really did look regretful when he turned to her. It sat oddly on him, like he’d had a personality transplant. “Agent Coulson has been working with Ian Quinn all along, since before he came to SHIELD.” 

“While he was working for Stark Industries,” Stark muttered, a low rolling growl. He, Phil knew, would be thinking of Pepper, and her letters of reference for him. Phil wished he could say anything to reassure him, but, well-- in walking into Avengers Tower with a tie pin recording everything that got said around him, he’d broken her trust. With less malign intent than if he’d been smuggling on behalf of one of Stark’s indirect rivals, sure, but he’d broken it nonetheless.

_She told me to take care of them. I have tried. It’s just gone a bit sideways, at the moment._

“Indeed.” Felix answered Stark, then gestured at the crates. “Helping him smuggle both the electronics and some other rather suspect components to Quinn’s current base of operations at the warehouse.” 

He looked back up at Phil then, and his eyes were deep enough to drown in.

“You must have known I-- or someone-- was getting close,” he continued. “I know you met Agent Ward here when he followed the crates to the island, after the storm, and kicked him off the island.”

“He didn’t exactly introduce himself as an Agent of SHIELD,” Phil managed, proud that he’d kept from growling. He wasn’t sure whether or not he regretted not having used his sharp little knife at the time.

“Granted.” Felix said, and backed off a little, to pace around the small room as he spoke. “That’s why you went to Fury, isn’t it? Knowing he’d be desperate? He was always a little sentimental when it came to you. Easy enough for you to play on that. Or maybe he had his own reasons; I don’t pretend to know Nick’s mind anymore.”

“You think Coulson infiltrated the Avengers to… what?” Natasha asked, breaking in before Phil could formulate a response. “Undermine us? Keep us from going after Quinn?”  
She hadn’t moved from Phil’s side; he could smell the shea butter in her hair, she was so close. He wasn’t sure whether he was grateful, or wished her farther off, saving herself from whatever mess this was going to turn into.

“Yes. Exactly,” Felix said, “and to break you apart, so you couldn’t interfere with Quinn’s plans.”

 _Actually,_ Phil thought, staring straight into the eyes of his former lover and trying to formulate a response that didn’t implicate him, Natasha, Clint, or the girls, _I think I’d prefer the cheese to this._

\---  
To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: the battle of the Avengers liaisons is fought largely in snark, and Clint has an idea
> 
> Okay, look, I know what you’re all thinking, but I swear I didn’t split this chapter just to end on this cliffhanger. That was just a bonus.
> 
> So the good news is that, with the chapter split, I just built myself back a wee tiny buffer! I don’t know yet whether Chapter 2 ~~2~~ 3 will suffer from the same “two chapters in length, one in story” problem, but if it does I shouldn’t have to delay posting the way I did last week. Our next post is Sunday, February 8.


	22. Cutting Out Expeditions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil tries to talk himself out of trouble, Clint reconsiders all his life choices, and Natasha and Skye just try to keep up with the pace of events.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: Chickens may be in need of a babysitter shortly.

**One**

“Oh for chrissake, Felix, that’s insane. I am _not_ in league with Ian Quinn.” Coulson’s voice was tight, curling a little just on the last words. He was surprised, nervous-- and _showing_ it. Natasha reacted almost instinctively to such un-Coulson-like behavior, dropping back out of his reach, her hackles rising. 

Tony gave a little hum, and tapped his chin with a long thin hydraulic bar, which he’d dug out of one of the crates. He’d been sifting through them idly while Blake made his accusations, rather the way a cat fixed itself on anything besides it’s prey. By now, he likely knew exactly what was contained in each of the crates-- and possibly knew better than Skye and Clint what all of it did. Now he was switching from multi-task mode to hyper focus, and his eyes were fixed on Coulson like he was finally working out how the man went together.

Steve shifted, his arms crossed tightly in front of him, looking more and more equine by the moment. Even without the cowl he’d shifted into high Captain America mode. Blake give him a tiny head tilt, acknowledging the shift in him, before he turned back to Coulson.

So did Natasha, and found herself set off-balance _again_ by the man.

He’d taken that half moment when her eyes were off him to pull himself back together, and it wasn’t Phil with the unfortunately-tasty-toes and the hunted look she saw-- it was Agent Coulson of SHIELD, impervious in his tailored pinstripe armor and looking like hanging around in bunkers being accused of collusion in-- at best-- smuggling contraband, was just one of those unfortunate aspects of Monday mornings. He met Blake’s gaze head-on, and his look was pure disappointment. 

Blake countered with his little bland half-smile, and tucked his hands in his trouser pockets.

“Prove it, Phil. Please. I’d love to hear what you have to say.”

“Hear hear,” Tony muttered. He sounded less certain, already, than he had the moment before.

“I _don’t_ have much to say, Felix,” Coulson said, and moved away, trailing one hand along the crates, and displacing Tony, who turned to watch him as he walked past. “These things? They washed ashore during Tropical Storm Fred. I pulled them in here hoping to find out who owned them and return them. That’s all the more I know about them.”

“You never followed up?” Tony asked. 

“They weren’t exactly my highest priority,” Coulson shrugged. “They weren’t from Stark Industries, they didn’t contain anything that would help me repair the power plant, and weren’t going to be useful feeding my flock.”

“You used to be more curious than that,” Blake said.

“I would have gotten there eventually-- if I hadn’t gotten side-tracked.” Coulson had reached the instrument panel now, and was poking at it. Steve watched his hands suspiciously for a moment before looking back up. 

“You tell me Agent Ward here was looking for them, and I believe you,” Coulson continued with a nod to Blake, as he moved away from the instrument panel and dusted his fingers off fastidiously. “It explains why he paid me a visit a few weeks back… and why he drugged my dog. It doesn’t explain why he didn’t _tell_ me what he was looking for, but I suppose that’s all classified.”

Steve frowned at the mention of the dog, and Natasha fought down a snort, because that one was almost too easy.

“So you didn’t know what was in these?” Tony asked Coulson, picking up one of the broken pipettes and turning it over and over.

“Oh I knew-- for a given definition of knew. Nothing in them helped me identify them, so I left them alone. I’m paid to take care of the island, not track lost packages. Or--” he smiled softly, “I was.” 

It was a good performance, Natasha had to give him that. Tell the truth, and only the truth-- and just leave out the Hawkeye-shaped parts. 

She wouldn’t have been shocked if he _had_ just given it up and given Clint up to save his skin-- even though just at the moment it would only have diverted the suspicion onto Clint, with the attendant and always predictable disagreement between Steve and Tony, now made worse by Blake’s interference.

That Phil hadn’t done it wasn’t proof he was entirely on the side of angels, but it did ease her heart.

Phil had reached the door now, and turned to face them, the outside light outlining him in glowing white as he stood there serenely.

Natasha could see the moment when Steve realized there was no one between him and the door. He startled and took a half-step forward, then stopped-- did he think it was rude to outright imply Phil was looking to escape, by moving between them?  
“What about this hacker Agent Ward mentions? This Skye? Why would she knock him out? Why would she even be here?” Steve asked, starting forward again, awkwardly, and coming up on the doorway by degrees.

Phil shrugged, giving ground without complaint.

“I met Skye at the Blue Peter-- she’s a waitress there. We needed another helping hand after Fred,” he said. “Couldn’t handle all the repairs alone and hope to have them done by winter. Skye needed another part-time job. It was a natural fit. She occasionally takes care of the chickens, too, when no one else is around. I have no idea what she might or might not do in her free time-- I’m not her keeper. I can only assume she found Agent Ward… intimidating… and may have reacted hastily.”

Agent Ward, who’d been quietly binding up his chafed wrists with something from his tac vest, turned his bland, handsome face on Phil. He looked confused as a puppy, and Natasha fought hard against the urge to pinch his cheeks.

 _Oh so that’s how he does it,_ she thought. Best marks for infiltration since herself, and all on the basis of the kind of limpid sincerity that would put a child actor to shame.

“Speaking of,” Tony broke in, pointing the bar at Phil now and waggling it-- which would have been more impressive had it not kept on flopping around at the joint-- “what about the other part of Agent Blake’s accusation, huh? Why’d you come to the Tower, really now? If this is all a big misunderstanding, what the hell were you doing playing baby Agent after being a hermit for the last decade and a half?”

Phil laughed. 

It took Tony aback, and Steve too-- literally, even. They both backpedaled a step, a nearly synchronized motion. Natasha hadn’t seen them so united in reaction since Clint leapt out a tower window. 

Felix Blake was still lurking in his corner of the bunker looking enigmatic, but she thought she caught an echo of a smile cross his face-- whether it was nostalgia or reluctant admiration, she didn’t care to say. 

“You’ve met Hawkeye,” Coulson said simply, as if that explained everything, and then stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and smiled at them. 

_No._

But Natasha couldn’t think of a way to stop him, if he were really determined.

“You’re going to need to explain that,” Steve said, when the silence hanging between them had grown so big it threatened to fill the little room. 

“Hawkeye,” Coulson said again, then pointed behind him out the open door. Natasha realized abruptly that he’d placed himself there not to get out, but so that Kate and Bruce could hear him. “You’ve met her.”

“Oh! You mean-- the girl. You mean the girl Hawkeye. Not the… you mean the girl.” Tony deflated a little, and finally set down his prop.

“Who else would I mean, Mr Stark?” Coulson asked gently. 

Natasha realized she was holding her breath. _Who else indeed? Certainly not the Hawkeye who lives with you on this island. Oh, Phil, careful-- careful. I will end you if you expose him now. They won’t have a choice. They’ll have to bring him in._

“Tony,” Steve said, reaching over to grab him by the shoulder and squeeze briefly. “You did this outside, too. Why?”

“I just…” Tony shrugged. “Never mind. It’s not… I mean it’s a rational thing to wonder, isn’t it? With Quinn’s crates turning up here, with SHIELD agents crawling all over the island. Perfectly reasonable to assume, when they haven’t found his body.”

He looked so crestfallen that Natasha found herself wondering if he hadn’t gone along with Blake’s plan in part _because_ of that, to see if it stirred up any news of Clint, or maybe something to prove Tony and his evidence wrong. 

_There are less drastic ways of going about that, you nut._

“I think I would have reported if the dead body of an Avenger washed up here,” Phil said primly.

Natasha choked. 

He didn’t even glance at her as he continued. 

“If you ask around Gansett Light-- unless Agent Ward already has--” he said, with a side-eye at Blake and his underling, “you’ll find any number of people who’ll tell you that ‘the girl,’ as you call her, and I had a fight at the Blue Peter, about a week before I went to New York.”

“What about?” Natasha put in quietly, trying to ease him along before the others got a word in. _Please, please let this be the right play._

“She pointed out what happened when a hero fell,” Phil said, and his voice was gentle as the breeze through the dunegrass, with the same chill sad end of autumn edge to it. “I had said… something, honestly I don’t even _remember_ what, about the gossip out of New York, and she nearly bit my head off, right there in the middle of the restaurant with at least a half dozen friends of mine to back me up. She was a terror. I didn’t understand how important he’d been. How much it meant to see heroes among us, every day, fighting the threats. Normal people, not people with superpowers or advanced suits, who stepped up anyway.”

Steve was _not_ getting teary. He was _not._ Natasha was going to slap him if one actually spilled over. God damn the man for even _crying_ like a super soldier, all noble-faced and single perfect teardrop.

They’d forgotten Blake again, Natasha’d noticed. 

Phil was winning the underlying tug-of-war the two had been playing with the hearts and minds of the Avengers. Improbably, against all rational evidence, he was drawing them back. Blake wasn’t even trying to tug on his end of the rope at the moment. If anything, he looked confounded.

Which wasn’t exactly a common look on Felix Blake, Agent’s Agent, either, but then it had been a long, long time since he’d seen Phil in the flesh. If Phil had even been half this good back when they were together.

“And that stuck?” That was Steve.

“It did,” Phil said softly. “I thought about it maybe more than I should have. I’m _not_... I’m not anywhere in the same league. I’m just an ex-Army vet with some chickens and enough time on his hands to do search and rescue, after all. But I used to be.” 

He looked up at Blake, and his face could have been written in Linear B for all Natasha could decipher it. Blake ducked his head, wary and wounded both, so still he might have been just another piece of abandoned equipment left behind in the bunker when the last scientists cleared out.

“I used to be part of something special,” Phil continued, still looking at him. “I used to be part of a unit that _protected_ people, even when it meant we came back bloody, half-alive, and covered in brie. And I’d… picked up a few skills there. Skills that I’d been letting go underutilized. When it came down to it, I’d been thinking about doing something drastic for a while. Hawkeye pushed me over the edge, is all. So,” he shrugged, turning back to the room in general. “I emailed May. Just to ask. Beat me to _hell_ and back, when she wanted me to come in so quickly.”

_This has to be the performance of his life. Hell, he’s even guilt-tripping Tony and Steve into mush. If this goes on much longer they’ll just be puddles on the floor. He’ll be able to walk right out over them._

“And when Director Fury brought you to us?” Tony asked. “You didn’t plan for that?”

“Hell, Stark, pull the feed from the conference room during my supposedly-informational interview,” Phil said. “I know you can. I didn’t even know Marcus was _alive_ when I walked into SHIELD. I was just trying to see if I could be useful somewhere.”

“And that’s the whole story?” Steve asked. Natasha kept her eyes on Phil, and on Blake. He had recovered enough, once Phil’s eyes left him, so that he had turned into the absolute picture of insouciance-- which meant he was still nervous as hell. 

“That’s all I’ve got to give you,” Phil shrugged, a light devil-may-care sort of gesture. “Take it or leave it.”

“So why don’t we ask this amazing girl her side of the story?” Agent Ward cut in, rubbing one wrist lightly with his hand. “You know, the one you gave access to your bunker? The one who tied me up? The hacker?”

“Sure, if you can find her,” Coulson said, and Ward smiled at him thinly.

“Excuse me,” Bruce stepped through the door, still holding onto Kate Bishop with one hand, pushing her in front of him. “We’ve got a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” Tony asked sharply. He and Steve both snapped to attention in their different ways, a sight as familiar to Natasha by now as seeing them bumbling around the kitchen pre-coffee. 

“SHIELD is here,” Bruce said, gesturing out the door. 

\----

When his vision cleared, Clint realized he was looking straight up at the sky.

It loomed close, hazy and gray, beyond the thick roil of smoke that filled the air. 

Closer to the ground people were yelling, fast and frantic and faint-- then something creaked and split and fell, far away from him now. Water pooled under his ears and misted over his face, the farthest reaches of a heavy spray he could hear playing against some vertical surface, changing tones as it slid from wood to concrete. Something heavy lay on top of him, squeezing the breath out of his body, stinking of soot, sweat, and Old Spice.

Jamie, Clint realized. It was Jamie.

Jamie was collapsed on top of him, and on top of Jamie, balanced heavily on his ass, was a wooden sign that was nearly as long as them both. 

At least Jamie was breathing-- if the garlic exhalations wafting towards Clint’s nose were any indication. This was good, because it meant he could just lie there and rest for a moment, before trying to heave wood and man off of him-- or he could, except that a vision appeared to him, stalking out of the surrounding crowd, backlit in the morning sun, squat and vengeful as any tiki goddess. 

“Frank Barney,” the vision said, in the voice of Wanda Jackson, “get your pale ass up from under that man and come with me. You’ve got trouble at home, and we don’t need it spreading over to here.”

“But,” Clint gasped, “the fire.”

His rookie run with the Gansett Light Volunteer Fire Brigade hadn’t turned out to be his most heroic outing ever. By the time the Brigade had gotten to the Outrageous Egg, it had already been mostly engulfed in flames, feeding away merrily on the copious amounts of grease that had coated every available surface in the place and crawling its way through the duct work.

There was little they could do except turn hoses on it from the street, soak the surrounding buildings to try and keep it from spreading, and hang on. The volunteer companies from further down the island joined them one by one-- Loveladies, Harvey Cedars, Ship Bottom-- helping them hold back the fire. The Egg slowly became little more than a shell of itself, mottled carbon black and ashen white, encompassing a molten core. Thick greasy smoke billowed from it and curled in the air, spreading its fingers for blocks as the wind took it. 

The Chief had noticed it first-- the little clapboard surfing store next door starting to smolder around the edges. While the Brigade was shifting, getting hoses in place, to start work on _it_ , Clint and Jamie had been sent in with hooks to pull down the wooden sign that swung heavily below the decorative surfboards that studded its roof like so many jagged teeth. They’d tugged hard at the already-smoldering sign-- too hard, apparently. He’d barely heard the creak as the hooks began to give way before he was lying flattened beneath it, breathing in the remnants of Jamie’s breakfast.

And now, staring up at Wanda Jackson and trying desperately to think.

“The fire will go on without you, Mr. Barney, don’t you worry about that. I already talked to the Chief, to tell him there was an emergency on North Bar,” Wanda said, and thumbed over her shoulder. “The professionals are here now. Nothing to do but hold on. They’re starting to rotate the Gansett company out, anyway.” 

Clint turned his head and saw their heavy-booted feet-- the regulars come over the Manahawkin bridge at last to free up the cavalry. 

“Okay,” he sighed, and began to heave himself free of firefighter and surfing sign. Jamie groaned and started to curse. 

“Yeah, buddy, I know,” Clint told him, not without sympathy. “But I gotta go.”

“Huh,” Wanda said, watching him as he dragged himself out from underneath the sign. He tried to be pissed off that she hadn’t so much as reached out a hand to help, treating him like some kind of live-action cable drama she couldn’t quite look away from, but he couldn’t muster up the energy for it. “Maybe we’ll stop at the ambulance first, get that arm of yours looked at.”

Clint glanced down, to find his right arm a mess of blood and soot.

“Just a scratch,” he said, shrugging, and Wanda huffed out a sigh that suggested she’d heard better excuses from four year olds.

“Better be,” she said, and dragged him away.

\-----

Doc Halliday was at Wanda Jackson’s seaside house when Clint finally arrived, sipping on coffee from a squat cup patterned in gilded leopards and flipping impatiently through a copy of US Weekly. She took one look at him, damp, covered in soot, and trying desperately not to track it all over Wanda’s cream-and- teal foyer, and set the coffee cup down.

“Shower first?” she asked Wanda, as she got up and started over.

Wanda turned back to look at Clint, dragging her eyes from toe to crown _far_ more slowly than he thought necessary, her lips pursed in thought.

“Hmph. Yeah, I guess so.”

“I’m fine,” Clint said, “all I need is a boat.”

Doc Halliday had reached them now and was bending down, spreading magazine pages in front of him, a thin path leading to the relative safety of the kitchen with is fire-glazed tile floors.

“Yeah, well I gave Kate Bishop my boat,” Wanda said, “and she’s gonna tell us what needs doing next, so you _shower_ , because if you need to go off and be stupid, you can at least do it clean, not letting everybody know where you’ve been by your filthy feet.”

Clint stepped carefully over the papers, leaving sooty marks on the faces of several soap opera stars, at least one hip-hop artist, and Tony Stark as he passed.

He was into the kitchen and Wanda was opening a door for him when Doc Halliday interrupted again.

“Wait. You can’t take that bandage in the shower. Come here.” She pointed at her feet. Clint looked at her finger, at her, at the floor, and sighed.

He shuffled over to heel and held out his arm.

What he’d expected he wasn’t quite sure, but it wasn’t to have the Doc rummage around in Wanda’s junk drawer, pull out a box of saran wrap, and begin winding it around his arm. Wanda grunted her approval from the door.

 _Still better than SHIELD medical, I guess,_ Clint thought.

\----

The shower in question turned out to be on the lower level, which had clearly been built as a breakaway. The walls were high and bare, the floors concrete, and the bathroom itself was the only finished room-- hell, the only _room_ on the level. Wanda said she kept for thorough scrub-downs and de-jellyfishing after swimming, but that it could probably handle “a big man and a bigger load of dirt.” 

She’d set down some of the thin embroidered towels people only ever got out for guests, and then found him (how?!) a large men’s raglan shirt “since even if you can pull off that wet t-shirt look, it can’t be comfortable.”

Clint waited until he heard her feet retreat up the stairs to start stripping. 

Once in the shower, he curled himself into the cool tile and simply hacked for a while, bracing himself as each fresh wave of coughing swept over him. _At least I’ve got a lot of practice in lately._ His lungs were leading a revolution, trying to escape through his throat, and his ribs felt like they were joining in the insurrection. Water poured over his head, trickled off his beard, pooled at his feet where greasy soot marks still lingered at the corners of the shower. He was keeping his right arm out of the stream; despite the layers of saran wrap over the bandage, he didn’t trust it getting wet.

He’d intended to shower quickly but his lungs had other ideas. While he hacked, his mind swirled like the water down the drain, a neverending round of _what the hell does “I’m about to do something incredibly stupid” even mean, Skye?_

“It means I did something incredibly stupid. But! I think we’ve hit paydirt, boss,” Skye said, from outside the shower curtain. 

Clint jumped straight in the air, both hands flying down to cover his junk as he landed-- even though he was nearly 95% certain that Skye couldn’t see that much of him through the bronze reeds that printed the otherwise translucent shower curtain.

“Also, we hit a SHIELD agent,” America Chavez’s voice put in.

“That’s great. That’s just great,” Clint said, sagging, “I love how my shower has become a debrief. I suppose Kate’s out there, too?” 

“No,” America said, and he could hear the frown in her voice even through the distortion of the running water, “she stayed on LBI to shoot the SHIELD Agent, if he tried to make a move.”

“She… she what?”

“Well, we left him tied up and unconscious in the bunker, but we don’t think that’s gonna last long,” Skye said, and Clint banged his head delicately against the tile.

_This must be what my COs always felt like around me._

“All right,” he said, “I’m coming out.”

There was a long pause-- a very still one.

“Skye? America?”

“Yeah?” they chorused.

“ _Out_ ,” he growled.

 

**Two**

_SHIELD is here?_

Even with Blake’s constant hurrying and worry over it, Natasha had not really been expecting to hear those words.

Neither, clearly, had the others, and for a moment the occupants of the bunker were frozen, trying to assimilate the news.

Tony was the first to recover, glancing out the door, where he apparently failed to see anything.

Drawing his head back in, Tony sent a pair of raised eyebrows at Blake, who held up his hands in a _not me_ gesture and looked at Natasha. 

_Why me?_ she thought as she shook her head and stared at Ward. It would make sense, after all, if he’d sent off some kind of distress signal.

Ward glared back at her, then looked over at Coulson, his mouth firming in an accusatory pout. Tony followed his gaze, as did Steve, Bruce, and Blake himself.

“Nope,” Coulson said, with a little shrug of his mouth. “Not me.”

“Well _definitely_ not us,” Tony said, fidgeting again with the items in the crates. Natasha began to worry he was _planning_ something. “You?” Tony asked suddenly, turning on Kate Bishop.

She was still being held captive, if gently, by Bruce, and she glanced down at where he’d pinioned her arm before looking up at Tony, her face a study in shocked offense.

 _I can picture her shouting down Phil now,_ Natasha thought. _I wonder if anyone’s ever managed to keep that girl from sassing first and thinking later._

“Oh yeah, it was me. Because I can totally call SHIELD using just my brain. Not a _chance_.”

“Wait a minute,” Ward snapped, pointing at her. “Who the hell is she?” 

“She calls herself Hawkeye. The girl from the Blue Peter. She tied you up,” Steve replied, turning to look at him even as he slipped his shield off of his back. “Or so you said.”

“No. No,” something was starting to slip in Ward’s cool face, ice cracking just under the surface, or wax melting. “Different brunette. Shorter. Shaggier bangs. Plaid shirt. Where did-- where did she go?” he growled, surging on Kate. Bruce tucked her behind him.

“Where did _who_ go?” Kate asked, truculently. She was playing the sullen teenager so well that if Natasha hadn’t just seen her, glorious with her bow, she’d never have believed it. _You do know how to pick them, Clint._

“Skye. The hacker. With the Rising Tide.” 

Ward was starting to look a little wild, and he turned to his boss for support. Support Felix Blake clearly couldn’t give, and the look he returned Ward was mild and uncommittal.

“We haven’t met her. This is Kate Bishop,” Blake responded, before turning to Kate herself. “Aren’t you?”

“Last I checked,” Kate snapped, looking a little wild herself now. “And I am, like, the complete opposite of a hacker. I can’t even get my phone to unlock when I forget my password.”

 _What the hell?_

Natasha found herself glancing at Phil instinctively, and found him staring straight back at her. 

If Ward didn’t know which Conspiracy Scout was which, even when one hit him on the head, what else might he fail to know? Was he not connected to Triplett at all?

 _But_ Blake _knows Kate’s name, when she and Phil were both so careful not to let it pass their lips. What the hell is going on here?_

“All right, all of you, get out of there and tell me what the hell is going on here.” 

The voice boomed into the bunker, bounced around its edges, reverberating deep into the recesses. Strong, clipped, and more than a little enraged.

Victoria Hand. It had wanted only that. 

In the bunker, the Avengers and Agents Blake, Ward, and Coulson all looked at each other with identical expressions of bewilderment.

“What, does she want to come join the picnic?” Tony asked, his voice skirling upwards on the end.

“Like I said,” Bruce sighed, “SHIELD’s here. Shall we?”

They did, trooping out into the light slowly, with Phil and Kate coming in the middle of the line. 

Kate had turned pale at the mention of her name, and she was paler still now, and Natasha felt a wave of sympathy come over her for the fledgeling Hawkeye. _It’s different than you expected, isn’t it? Oh, child. It always is._

If she’d been standing any closer, Natasha would have reached out a hand to steady the girl, even knowing it would draw unwanted attention. As it was, she settled for giving Phil a slight jerk of her chin in Kate’s direction. He saw it, nodded, and whispered something in her ear.

Kate straightened perceptibly.

_Good. We need all our wits about us._

“Agent Hand,” Steve said, straightening as he came out of the bunker and looked around, “and… friends.” 

_Friends_ indeed. Agent Triplett stood at her right hand, all lean and suave in his Agent’s suit, and he had a gun trained on the Avengers. Agent Amador stood at her left hand, also armed and dangerous, and the effect was stunning; a tall streak of fire and ice between two shadows. Three other agents, carrying heavy weaponry, completed the half circle that surrounded the bunker door. 

That left the Avengers, their associated Agents, and Kate Bishop with their backs to the concrete wall and their eyes still adjusting to the hazy sunlight, trapped like dozy rats.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Tony asked, truculent even in the face of several sub machine guns, two Glocks, and a Colt. His hands were starting to drift towards the bracelets on his arms, clearly itching to call his metal home to him.

“I could ask you the same thing, Mr. Stark,” Agent Hand replied, holstering her gun and crossing her arms. She looked no less dangerous for all she’d put away the projectile weapon. Her eyes were sharp enough to cut. “You didn’t inform anyone you were going, you didn’t file a flight plan, and Mr. Wilson back at the Tower was notably unhelpful. Anyone would think you were hiding something.”

Felix Blake slid out from behind Steve at that moment, and smiled at Hand, a brief little greeting from one hunter to another.

“Hello, Victoria,” he said, “It’s me they were hiding.”

“Yes, Felix,” she sighed, “I know that. You’re not as subtle as you think you are.” She looked around all of them, shaking her head like a particularly disappointed teacher-- ballet, Natasha thought. Or possibly flamenco. Definitely something in the arts.

“Why are you here,” Steve repeated, moving back in front of Blake. Natasha noticed that he hadn’t put his shield away, though he kept it down, ostensibly at rest. It was a thin illusion-- Hand knew in minute detail just what kind of damage he could do from a resting position. “This isn’t your concern. Agent Coulson’s on tap at the moment, and he’s with us.”

‘Agent Coulson’ lifted a bare eyebrow at the sheer hubris of that statement, but said nothing else, choosing to just watch Hand. Natasha didn’t blame him one bit. The less he said, the less there was for them to have to explain later.

She wondered if he was watching Agent Triplett as closely as she was; certainly Kate Bishop had fixated on him, and her glare was nearly as hot as Victoria Hand’s herself. 

_My god, that girl is a firebrand. Scared stiff, but still hot. I hope she’s not as rash as her namesake-- we only need one Hawkeye pulling reckless tricks._

(What else was the Hawkeye name about, though?)

“Agent Coulson’s why I’m here,” Hand said, turning to him. Phil cocked his head to the side now, parroting Blake.

“What can I help you with?” he asked.

“You can come with me. Quietly.” 

“Oh, woah, now, wait,” Tony said, stepping forward and half in front of Phil, as if he himself hadn’t just been accusing the man of… what? Treason? Or only duplicity? “No one is going anywhere. Not before you explain.”

_He’s our prize, is that it, Tony? Or did he manage to win you all the way over, back there in the bunker?_

Phil had gone still behind him, all the patience gone from his face, leaving a surprisingly calculating look behind. He wasn’t planning to run, Natasha could see that. He’d just forgotten, in his worry, to be bland.

The lift of his chin had her frantic to stop things somehow, time itself if necessary, because heavens only knew what he was going to do next-- and Natasha couldn’t see a way forward that ended _well_ for him. Or Clint.

But just at the moment there was nothing she _could_ do but wait on her spiderweb and see how events moved.

“Agent Triplett has been doing some investigating for me,” Hand snapped at Tony, “investigating I’d have thought _you’d_ be interested in. He believes-- and I agree with him-- that the only people who could have poisoned me were other SHIELD agents assigned to the Tower. And there aren’t many of us.”

“Wait, but… you think _Coulson--_ ” Tony pointed at Phil, who shifted a little on his spot, as if the path beneath him was a little uneven.

“Agent Hand, I assure you,” he started, but Steve cut him off.

“And then he what? Gassed himself to cover it up?”

“It’s a working theory,” Hand said, her red lips curving into a smile, “yes.”

 _It’s a working_ something _all right._

“Motive?” Natasha asked, crossing her arms and settling in, trying to make herself look as SHIELD-standard as possible. _Come on Hand, report to me, agent to agent. This doesn’t add up at all._

Or else it did far too chillingly well.

“Oh, we already have the motive,” Agent Blake said now, and his voice was smooth as citrus honey. “Isn’t that why we’re all here?” He turned to look over his shoulder at Natasha, and his face was all smooth sympathy.

“Agent Romanov-- sorry. Not ‘Agent’ anymore.” He held up his hands to ward off any protest. “I know you and Agent Coulson have grown… close. Believe me when I say I understand how painful this all is, to anyone who’s respected him. I didn’t believe it at first-- not until the evidence forced me to. But if you want a way to distract the Avengers-- the single most effective private security squad in the world-- from your illicit activities right under their noses, well, what better way can _you_ think of to do it then by planting one of your people in their midst?”

 _’Grown close.’ Yes, and if I keep pushing right now, what are the odds someone will say that means_ I’ve _been compromised? With Clint supposedly dead under a cloud of suspicion, it’s a miracle it hadn’t started to loom over me already._

“Agent Hand,” Blake continued, turning to the woman, “Agent Ward here was detained on the island by one of Coulson’s accomplices. We have reason to believe he may be working with Ian Quinn and Cybertek.”

“I’ll take that into consideration, Agent Blake.” Hand’s scowl had only increased in depth and complexity the longer Blake talked, and by the time she spoke, hurricane warning flags were going up over the dark clouds gathering about her brows.

“If you’d like to come back inside with us,” Blake gestured towards the bunker door, still open to the cool, dusty depths, “we could get on with our questioning.”

Natasha caught Kate’s glance towards the bunker, her concentration, and wasn’t sure whether she liked the idea or not. Phil just snorted and bounced a little on his feet, watching the other agents as if the outcome of their discussion was of academic interest only.

Hand gave Blake a dry smile.

“I’m not in your chain of command, Agent Blake,” she said, “so I can’t dictate your course of action. But you’ll find it hard to question Agent Coulson in there since I’m taking him back to headquarters. Melinda May will be handling this interrogation. She is… _eager_ to get her hands on him.”

Phil _did_ wince at that, and not subtly, either. Natasha couldn’t say she disagreed-- Agent May didn’t usually take turns in the interrogation room. When she _did_ , something had gone drastically wrong.

Which, from May’s point of view, Natasha supposed it had.

“No.” Tony said, coming to stand directly in front of Phil. “Absolutely not. We’re not done with him, yet.”

“He’s not a _toy_ , Stark,” Hand growled, rocking forward to loom over Tony, like a stork descending on a bullfrog. “And you’ve got absolutely no jurisdiction over him. Over anything! This is SHIELD business right now. You can review the feeds of the interrogation.”

“ _Absolutely not_.” Steve had joined Tony now, pressing Hand back. “How the hell can we trust SHIELD? You’ll just throw him in the Fridge and we’ll never prove anything one way or another. We don’t know that he’s guilty!”

“Steve,” Blake started, shouldering in between him and Victoria Hand with a truly impressive disregard for danger-- and the possibility of being pulverized between the twin lasers of their glares.

 _Oh god_ , Natasha thought, paralyzed, _this is as bad as it was when Clint jumped. We’re not going to survive another round of this._ She glanced towards Bruce as the argument continued, and found him already starting to green around the edges, like he was leeching the remaining color out of the late-season grasses. 

She reached out and put a hand on his arm-- and was startled to find Kate doing the same from the other side, covering his hand with hers where it still clutched her.

Phil was watching them more than he was the argument in progress, into which Agent Amador had just waded with a terse “if you had just aided our investigation when it was only Hawkeye, none of this would have happened.” 

As Natasha watched, Phil’s eyes flicked over to the guards, to Agent Triplett, who so far was keeping them in check, and then back to her. He looked at her longest, searching for something in her face.

Natasha had no idea if he liked what he’d found. Her ability to read him had disappeared entirely, or else he’d stopped reacting entirely. 

After awhile, he gave a satisfied little nod, winning whatever his internal debate had been.

“Please make sure to feed the chickens,” he told Kate, whose eyes went big and round at the implication. Before Natasha could think of a way to stop him, Phil had stepped up to the crowd of wildly gesticulating superheroes and spies.

“Agent Hand,” he said mildly, “I’m ready when you are.”

That got their attention, the whole mass of them turning to stare at him as one.

“You really don’t have to go, Coulson,” Steve started, only to be stopped mid-sentence by Phil’s smile.

“It’s best to clear this up now, I think,” he said. “I trust Agent Hand and Agent May to be careful and scrupulous in their investigation.”

Which meant, Natasha hoped-- Natasha could not afford for a minute not to think-- that he was going to appeal to May or even to Fury. If anyone could spin it, she was sure he could. Phil’s instinct for that sort of thing was turning out to be as spot on as Clint’s aim.  
“Very well then, Agent Coulson,” Hand’s voice was soft now, “come with me, if you please.”

“I don’t think I have much choice, Victoria,” he replied, and stepped out from behind Tony. Agent Amador came forward to take him by the arm.

She pulled a set of handcuffs out of her pocket, and Steve jerked forward. Natasha lunged for him as gracefully as she possibly could under the circumstances, and grabbed the back of his neck.

“Damnit, Steve, don’t start a brawl,” she hissed at him. “You’ll only get people hurt for no reason. If Coulson wants to go, let him go.”

Steve’s confusion, when he turned to look at her, was almost pathetic.

 _You better be reading this right, Phil. I’m trusting you,_ she thought.

“At least take Agent Ward,” Blake interjected as Hand was beginning to gather herself, jerking his head at the tall, rather disheveled agent who was still lurking near the bunker door. “He knows my theories, and he needs to debrief and get medical attention anyway.”

“Sir--” Ward stepped forward, looking at him. “Will you be….” he trailed off, looking at the Avengers as if they were a set of kind of rough and tumble children and he was wondering if they were fit to mingle with his own little angel.

“I’ll be fine, Grant,” Blake smiled gently at him. Natasha thought Ward’s face thawed just a miniscule amount.

“All right,” he nodded. “Whatever you say, sir.”

He stepped out of the shadow of the bunker and walked up to Hand, presenting himself and coming to attention just briefly. He winced as he did, some hidden bruise presenting itself to his _own_ attention, apparently. 

As they started to troop out, Hand’s heavily-armed agents turned to follow her, winding their way up the path through the scrubby, barren trees. The Avengers watched them go in various states of shock. Natasha had eyes mostly on Phil’s straight, tailored back, wandering along with as little concern as if he were just out for a walk in his woods.

Just as they were nearly gone around the bend, Agent Triplett turned back.

“Oh, nearly forgot,” he said, walking rapidly back towards them. His eyes were incongruously kind as he looked over them all, some hidden joke playing out in them. “We need Ms. Bishop, too.” 

“ _What_?” Kate shrieked, and Bruce only just caught her before her knees gave out. “Why me?”

“Person of interest,” he told her, gently. Natasha found herself wishing she had half his way of appearing genial and pleasant even while arresting teenagers. “Come on, Hawkeye.”

Natasha nearly stepped forward, had her mouth open, even, to say she was going with, but the words died in her throat, as Kate pulled away from Bruce, straightening up with shaking legs.

“If Phil trusts you, so do I,” she said, and turned back to Natasha. “We’ll be okay. Sounds to me like you have bigger problems to deal with.”

They were gone up the path before Natasha could think of a response to that.

“Holy crap she reminds me of Clint,” Tony muttered after a long silence, where they all stood in the clearing attempting not to look at each other.

“Oh be fair, Tony,” Bruce said, speaking for the first time since they’d come out into the late morning light, “Clint would have found a window to jump out of by _now_.”

And that was it. 

That was absolutely the last straw.

Natasha was doubled over, laughing into her hands, trying to wipe the tears away before anyone noticed they were forming. Because oh god, yes he would have, and perhaps that was Kate’s plan as well, if she could find a convenient window between North Bar and SHIELD headquarters.

_Not a lot of convenient windows on the jet, sadly. But maybe her Daddy, loathsome as he is, will bail her out. Having a child detained by SHIELD cannot be something he’d want getting out._

Tony wasn’t wrong; in their own separate ways, the two Hawkeyes both seemed willing to charge ahead and leave their fates to the universe to try and piece back together behind them once they’d crashed on through. 

The laughing jag subsided slowly, as did the roaring in her ears, and Natasha began to hear snippets of the conversation currently in progress without her.

“I’m surprised she didn’t kidnap you as well, Agent Blake,” Bruce was saying, with a nervous little laugh.

 _Huh_ , Natasha thought. _I need to find a time to get him in a quiet corner._

It hadn’t escaped her notice that he hadn’t been part of the Stark-Blake-Rogers cabal, and she wasn’t sure if that was coincidence, his own quietness, or something else.

“Victoria’s a good Agent, Dr. Banner,” Blake told him, ducking his head. “She and I don’t always see eye to eye-- she trusts the system, even now. I… well, I learned not to, let’s say. But she’ll be fair to Phil.” 

He looked like he was trying to convince himself, glancing back towards the path every so often.

“Not easy, mind you,” he continued, “but fair. If he has an explanation,” he shrugged. “This isn’t what I think any of us had hoped for.”

“No,” Steve said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “But it looks like we’ll have to deal with it later. At least if he’s guilty, he can’t warn Quinn or undercut us-- and if he’s innocent, well… we’ll get him out of there one way or another.” He was looking at Natasha as he said it, one eyebrow crooked, as if daring her to disagree-- or maybe just asking for her opinion.

Natasha was _well_ aware how quiet she’d been since they’d entered the bunker. Let them all think she was just dismayed that her lover-- or her confidant, whichever-- had been arrested. That she was afraid she’d been played. She. The _Black Widow._

_As if, as Clint would say._

Clint might be better at trusting his gut-- and she missed it like hell at the moment, that oh-so-sensitive bit of intestine-- but Natasha still knew what shape the reverberations along the strands of her web made, and right now everyone was trying to tell her _black fly_ , when the strands themselves were vibrating with the weight of something much bigger. Or perhaps several somethings.

She needed Clint. She needed his back to her back and his bow pulled tight.

And he was going to _kill_ her if Phil was innocent and she’d let him get arrested, even though it had been Phil’s choice in the end.

_Phil can take care of himself. I have to believe that. If Blake is right, we’ve got very little time to get Quinn. And if he’s wrong…. Well, if he’s wrong, I’m the only one here who knows the whole story._

Whatever Phil’s game was, he was leaving her with the Avengers to see what came next, to deal with Ian Quinn. Which had to be done, before Clint would be free and clear to come home to New York. She owed it to him and Kate to see this through.

“I think,” she said, surprised that her voice hadn’t gone rusty with lack of use, “That it’s way past time we got to that warehouse-- isn’t it Felix?” She fixed Blake with one of her coy little smiles as she said it, one he’d remember from any of a hundred Strike Team Delta missions past. The _well the intel’s fucked, the enemy’s spotted us, and we’re not even sure that’s our mark, but what the hell, it’s a nice day and we’re not doing anything else_ smile.

“Yes, Natasha,” Felix Blake agreed, smirking back at her. “I think it really is. Avengers?” He looked around at all of them. “Time to go.”

Steve smiled at him. 

“I think you mean ‘assemble,’” he said. As he did, the component parts of Tony’s suit whizzed past him, already beginning to settle around him like a swarm of large metallic monarchs coming to rest. 

Natasha climbed into the Quinjet just at Bruce’s back, and sighed as she straightened. Bruce turned around to look at her.

“You ready?” he asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” she said.

 

**Three**

 

Clint contemplated coming out in just the towel for a long moment, to underscore his point. (The one about not disturbing him in the shower, not the… other. _Not_ with the particular audience waiting outside.) Sadly, no amount of tugging and tucking would get the thin terrycloth to stretch far enough to fully encircle his hips, and the embroidered seashells on the front hem hit at a very awkward point no matter which way he draped it. He eventually gave it up as a bad cause. 

Still, he really didn’t want to face the shirt. He waited to pull it on until he was in the act of walking out of the bathroom-- and maybe he let it roll down a little more slowly than he otherwise would have.

“Seriously?” America asked, and snorted. He grinned at the sneer on her face.

“Why? Is it bad?” 

It was bad-- he knew it was bad. 

The shirt-- which Wanda had sworn was leftover from some silent auction, probably because everyone had sniggered too hard to lift a pen to bid for it-- was too small for him by at least a size. The navy sleeves bound his biceps and the white front clung to his ribs to the point where he felt like _Steve_ as he rolled it on. The chest was blazoned with an abstract view of the Gansett Light, set above three signal flags, and the initials LBI in fat capitals-- which wouldn’t have been so bad if the L and the I weren’t bigger than the B, mounded to either side of the lighthouse.

Wanda Jackson had a _terrible_ sense of humor.

“I wouldn’t say _bad_ , Boss,” Skye said, with more loyalty than truth. Clint decided he loved her just a little more for that. “But it’s a unique style, anyway.”

She and America were sprawled across a lumpy loveseat with a worn cover of brown satin. Skye was poking with her toe at the laptop on the busted reed coffee table in front of her, and America had turned upside-down, her feet planted against the exposed drywall behind them. _Holy crap, they really are just kids,_ he thought, feeling his throat constrict.

The furniture-- such as it was-- was typical of Wanda Jackson’s lower floor, with its high ceiling and breakaway walls. The corners were stacked with the detritus of summer terrace living; a wrought iron dining set, stacks of loungers, an almost absurd selection of boogie boards and fun noodles that suggested some hidden but substantial source of tween children in the offing. The other furniture, Doc Halliday’d explained in passing as she brought Clint down to the bathroom, was left over from her rental properties, removed after a year or so. After Hurricane Sandy, when Wanda’s house had been nothing but a pile of sodden matchsticks, she’d ended up camped in one of those rentals, sleeping on furniture donated by neighbors. Since then, she’d quietly made a point to keep her used furniture on hand, ready to be donated out again whenever someone else lost everything.

He wondered briefly if some of it would find its way to the tenants in the houses surrounding the Outrageous Egg.

At any rate, neither Skye nor America seemed any more bothered than he was to be consigned to the storage area. _Probably because they’ve both lived in far worse, kids or not._

Right. 

Clint felt his frustration at them start to drain away, gurgling faintly. Skye winked at him.

“Ready for your debrief?” she asked.

“Lay it on me,” he said. He sat down on the nearest convenient piece of furniture-- a battered white aluminum glider with stained all-weather cushions-- to struggle back into his soot-stained boots, hoping it would distract him a bit.

She laid it on him.

At length.

“Okay,” Clint said, when she finally teetered to a halt. She’d nearly given him at least three different small heart attacks during her story, and even once silence descended he still felt like his innards were sloshing up and down alarmingly. 

Skye and America were both staring at him now, expectantly, one face right-side up, the other upside down, wearing identical expressions of nervousness. 

“Okay, so, to sum up: you’ve got a SHIELD Agent locked in our bunker, he knows how you connect to the Rising Tide, he’s seen your face, Kate jumped bail, she’s supposed to shoot him if he gets out, and you think he already knows what Quinn keeps in his crates-- meaning he’s another possible SHIELD connection to the conspiracy. Right?”

“Right,” America said, nodding. Her hair bobbed against the floor.

“And you’re here because?” Clint prompted.

“Because we need guidance,” Skye told him, and well-- she wasn’t _wrong_. 

“You need a hell of a lot more than that,” Clint growled. 

He put his head in his hands, wishing he could block out reality for just a moment longer. He could hear the surf roaring in his ears, pounding up behind his eyes, the undertow dragging his stomach down with it, battering it against the breakwaters.

For a moment he felt himself going under, drowning.

_This is it. This is the moment it all comes crashing down._

Unfortunately, the world might be crashing around their ears, but it hadn’t stopped going ‘round, and he had two brilliant, determined, mildly insane young woman staring at him patiently with their big brown eyes.

Wanting _guidance_.

 _From him_.

A guy whose _guidance_ had usually been confined to deploying fully-adult, heavily-trained SHIELD agents in a variety of fairly not-fun situations. Skye and America, while they were closer to him in upbringing and age-beyond-years than his precious Hawkeye with her golden bow, were not fully-adult heavily-trained anything.

Why it had taken him until _now_ for the reality of the responsibility to hit, he wasn’t sure. He must have been distracted by something.

Phil, perhaps.

Or Lucky. Or a chicken or ten.

Or, well, the fact that he was still a wanted fugitive.

 _It’s the fall that’ll kill you_ Clint thought dizzily.

“Okay,” he said at last, on a sigh, dragging his mind into the present and sorting through options. “The first thing we need to do is contact Phil or Nat. We need to buy some time for you,” he shook a finger at Skye, “to finish your analysis. Ward’s going to be missed. We’ve got a narrow window to get the data we need to convince anyone of, well… anything. We’ll head back to the island so America can get Kate back here before her Dad smells a rat. I’ll watch for Ward. I can take him down if he gets out, without being seen.”

Miraculously, they actually seemed marginally satisfied with his answer. Skye’d pulled her laptop to herself again and was beginning to peck at it, and America was sitting up, her elbows draped across her knees. 

Both of them looked as settled and determined as any of his fully-grown agents ever had, and for one hallucinatory moment Clint thought he might know how his younger self and a newly-recruited Natasha had once looked to Felix Blake.

“Sounds like a plan,” America said. “When do we get going?”

“In a minute,” Clint said, and turned. “Skye, what do _you_ need to finish this?”

“As fast as we need to move?” Skye scrunched up her face, glaring at her laptop as if she could see straight through to its component parts. Clint wasn’t actually sure she _couldn’t_ , was the thing. “A supercomputer and about five other hackers would be helpful, boss. Don’t suppose you have access to any of that?”

Well, he _had_ asked.

“Sorry, fresh out,” he told her, thinking longingly of all the times in his past when he’d had analysts and handlers buzzing in his earpiece and milling around in briefing rooms, attempting to force-feed him as much information as he could choke down. “Used to though. What about your Tide contacts? Do you trust any of them?"

Skye wrinkled her nose and glanced away, looking remarkably like she was planning on pulling one of her whopper cover stories out of her ass.

She tapped at her laptop for a moment, hesitating so long that America finally reached over to poke her knee.

Clint wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but as he had no Tasha the hen to use he resigned himself to waiting her out.

Finally, Skye shrugged and sighed, and grimaced up at him.

"Doubt they trust me anymore. I... well I got a bug up my butt about Quinn. I wasn't in contact much while I tracked him. Then, well," she gestured mutely at him, "you all happened, and I just didn't have time for anything else. Anyway, it... I... I didn't _abandon_ them, they have lots of help."

"But they think you did," Clint whispered, feeling his heart contract a little at the misery that flashed briefly through her eyes.

"Don't you dare pity me, boss," she said. "I made my choices. But I'm kinda hacker non grata these days."

"Not to us," he replied, because even though it was almost an insult, under the circumstances, it needed to be said.

“We’re out of time,” America interrupted them, her voice gone flinty.

They both looked over at her, and Clint felt his guts curdle like cottage cheese. 

She was staring down at her phone, looking like it had turned into a cockroach and was about to run up her shirt. “Kate sent a text.”

She turned it around for them to see, and Skye cursed.

Kate hadn’t bothered with words; the picture she’d sent was eloquent enough. 

It was a single image, blurry (apparently her perfect aim did not extend to cameras) and half obscured by the spiky branches of juniper. Even given these deficiencies, the story it told was chilling. A Quinjet was sitting in a smallish clearing surrounded by bare shrubs, and two men in suits were frozen in mid-step as they walked away from the open ramp. 

Clint would have known them all anywhere: the Quinjet he’d spent hours and more adrenaline crashes than he could name in, to the point where he could feel her controls against his palms when he dreamed; the little field behind the mansion at North Bar (and oh that poor maltreated lawn-- had that really been necessary?); the two suits.

Felix Blake he’d known long enough to recognize in nearly any disguise.

Phil Coulson, who’d been burned onto his bones in such a short time that Clint probably would have recognized the man simply from the shift of air when he walked into a room.

“Okay,” he said, staring hard at the image swimming on America’s screen. “Okay.”

Clint didn’t have to explain what it all meant-- Skye and America both got it right away. If he weren’t so busy panicking, Clint thought a little wildly, he would have been proud of how quickly the dismay was spreading through their features, sweeping away all the calculation and concentration of the last few minutes and leaving only the bare poles of determination behind.

They _knew._ They could feel the sand crumble beneath their feet as well as he could.

Clint couldn’t remember if he’d taken down the archery butts after the last time he and Kate had practiced, but it didn’t really make a difference to how thoroughly, completely, irrevocably screwed they all were. 

Discovering Grant Ward hogtied in the bunker would be enough to sink her and Phil all on its own, even if they managed to hide who Frank Barney really was. And given his kind of luck, it was far too much to ask of an indifferent universe to suppose that they _wouldn’t find_ the agent in the bunker. 

It couldn’t just be an innocent jaunt to a private island for training, not with Felix Blake standing there, large as life and far too close to Phil’s side for a man who’d been dead to them all until a week or so ago. The same Felix Blake who’d ferreted through Phil’s-- and Clint’s-- cozy little seaside life on Friday.

Clint had been waiting for his luck to do its usual southward turn ever since he woke up in front of Phil’s fire. Now that it had finally come, he didn’t feel the release he’d expected, possibly because it wasn’t only him his luck was screwing over this time.

 _Either Kate and Phil give me up, and Blake decides they’re in on the conspiracy-- or they don’t and they end up with no good explanation. Shit. I’ve gone and gotten them_ both _into deep shit. Just like always._

This barren shore, with only one lonely track out of reach of high water, and little hope or choice but to take it, was familiar to Clint. Natasha at home with this bleak horizon as well, and Clint could only feel so guilty for dragging Phil here before he had to acknowledge that Phil had likely been familiar with the territory since long before they'd met. But these two-- and Kate-- he wouldn't have wished it on them for anything. (He'd led them straight here, though.)

He couldn’t look America in the eye. 

Couldn’t look _Skye_ in the eye.

Hell-- he was already plotting their upcoming infiltration of the Fridge (how long would it take them to finish with Phil and Kate in New York? Would it be easier to get to them during transit? Were the Fridge’s elevator shafts still configured with those convenient ladders?) when it hit him.

“Skye,” he said, slowly, “what if you _did_ have that supercomputer and five hackers to help?”

___

“What?” Skye said, looking up, watching Clint closely.

The transformation from grim-faced duel-at-noon Clint to the more familiar calculating variety was so sudden it gave Skye psychic whiplash. She glanced over at America, hoping she wasn't the only one feeling dizzy. America glanced back at her and shrugged.

"Boss? What?" 

Clint barely paid attention to her. He was far more transparent than Phil; she could almost see the shape of the plan that was starting to etch itself in his mind.

"A supercomputer. Five hackers. I could maybe arrange that. You'd have to talk fast. It'd... you'd...." He shrugged a little helplessly and circled his hands, and either Skye was turning telepathic or she'd just always known it would come to this. _Exposure._

It should have scared the fuck out of her. Skye dimly thought that, way back in the dark corners of her mind, it maybe did. The rest of her mind, though, was bubbling over with disturbing possibilities. Exposure, yeah, but she was already compromised. Meanwhile, the whole thing sounded disturbingly, well, _fun_. Something had been moving in her since she’d interrogated Agent Ward, a wild little spark shuffling about under her skin.

_Oh dear god, what does it say about me that not having to talk myself out of trouble for four weeks makes it a slow month, despite all the hacking into SHIELD and spying on Avengers?_

"I’m the best talker-faster there is, boss," she told him. "If you can find me the processing power, I'll make the rest happen." Clint nodded, holding her eyes for a long moment, then popped up with a smile so damn sweet that Skye could understand how Phil had fallen so fast.

“America,” Clint said quietly, turning to her, “how fast can you fly us to New York?” 

Skye saw her flinch at the word “fly,” the wash of fear through her eyes. Fear, as Kate would likely have agreed had she been present, didn’t sit right on America at all; the planes of her face weren’t shaped to hold it.

Clint saw it too, and Skye wanted to hug him for the steady way he watched America, like he was just asking about the catch of the day. No pressure, no expectation, and no blasted pity.

America probably would have killed him if she’d caught the least whiff of pity, and that would have… well it would have been _one_ way to end the whole “clear Clint’s name” problem, but it wouldn’t have helped the rest of them at all.

Finally, America shifted, raising her chin and resettling herself in a way that would probably have had Kate whimpering.

“How fast do you need to get there?” America asked in a coal-walker’s voice, tiptoeing fast over fire. Skye didn’t hug her, or smack her one on the lips, though she was really tempted to-- and she hoped America was grateful for her restraint. Whether Kate, or the danger, or the danger _to_ Kate had made her decide to trust Clint with her powers, Skye wasn't sure, but she beamed at them both-- until Clint raised an eyebrow at her.

Which, what? She was being discreet about it, right? He couldn’t tell that her body was singing with eagerness to get into troub-- oh, oh, right. 

He wanted her to answer.

"Um,” Skye said, knowing her answer wasn’t going to be helpful in the least. “Fast. Like, preferably an hour ago, but I’ll take what we can get.”

America took this in for a moment, grunting. Skye wondered if she was trying to figure out if she could carry them both, and how much it would slow her down. _How fast can a human fly anyway, under their own power?_

Clint might know. Well, he might know people who knew. 

_I suppose this isn’t the big deal for him that it is for us_.

America turned away from them finally and got up from the loveseat, wandering over to the high window set in the wide wooden door that led onto the beach, staring out at the dunes and the sea. Skye wondered if it helped her calculate load and lift and shit like that, or if she was just trying to get away from them.

“I do this, you guys got to promise me something,” America said, looking back. 

“Anything,” Clint told her, and Skye nodded her agreement.

“No Sliders jokes,” she said.

“What’s ‘Sliders?’” Skye asked, and Clint snorted.

Then they both got real quiet as America reared back and punched the wall.

Something shattered beneath her fist, cracking open in blue and white brilliance, shards flying everywhere and hitting nothing.

Skye felt her jaw drop open, as well, and her mind fuzz and blank.

America turned back to look at them, the smirk on her face nearly shy underneath.

“C’mon,” she said, “let’s go. You can tell me where we’re going while we walk, Hawkeye.” 

After a long moment where Skye tried to come up with a response, America looked between them, her smirk growing wider, discomfort beginning to rise slowly beneath it like the tide creeping in. “Don’t tell me neither of you have been through a dimensional portal before? Here I thought you were both seasoned pros.”

What had Kate ever seen in her, anyway? America wasn’t even remotely goddamn funny. Or impressive. _Because people just go around randomly opening dimensional portals, yes, America. You’ve made your point._

That said, Skye really ought to be saying something at the moment to make America stop squinching her face like that. Because this was a secret light-years bigger than just being able to _fly_. This was… if Skye really stopped to process what this meant, she thought she might just crack and start drooling.

Clint was staring, too, at the blue, at the buzz, and Skye briefly felt better about that, before realizing his face wasn’t pale because of the blue-white light, it was pale because he was… he was.

Yeah, no, Clint Barton, Hawkeye, didn’t get to do _terrified._ Skye couldn’t allow that.

The smile hadn’t left America’s face, but it was starting to drip around the edges, turn into something far younger, more vulnerable.

“Guys?” she asked.

Clint stirred and looked back at her, pulling his face together.

“It’s not my first dimensional portal, no,” he told her softly, and Skye just barely stopped herself from growling _of course._ He was an Avenger, after all. Probably hopped through them every other week.

“It’s not?” Curiosity replaced the worry in America’s voice, and Skye let her breath out.

“No,” Clint’s voice was still off, though, flat and featureless. “Though I never went through the last one. Someone came to us. Loki, in fact.”

He said the name with an offhand flip, so casual that it was hopelessly defiant, and Skye swallowed back all her relief. She didn’t know the whole story, _no one_ knew the whole story, not even after the court martials both after the Battle for New York (purely formal, really) and the ones after the fall of the Triskelion (absolutely the opposite of the last set). What everyone did know, though, was that Hawkeye’d briefly fought on Loki’s side, and that Hawkeye’s mind hadn’t been his own when he did.

Except-- did America know? Skye turned to her, urgent. _If she can open frickin’ rifts in the fabric of time and space, who knows where she grew up._

“It’s okay, Hawkeye” America said softly, and oh-- yeah. Like America could’ve been in love with Kate Bishop and not learn everything there was to know about Hawkeye and the Battle of New York. “I’ll be with you. And you wanted to travel fast.”

“I did,” Clint said, nodding, swaying forward like he meant to move but couldn’t figure out how.

“Well, let’s go, then,” Skye said. She jumped up from her seat and moved towards America, chin up, mouth screwed tight in determination. As she passed him, she grabbed his hand.

Clint let himself be dragged into the electric blue.

 _Phil and Kate-- you better be alive when we come for you. You_ owe _us_.

 

**Four**

 

Kate laid her head back against the scratchy blue upholstery of the jump seat she was strapped in to, and sighed, closing her eyes. Across from her, Phil shifted in his own seat, the SHIELD-issue cuffs on his wrists digging in a little as he adjusted his hands on his lap. He wished he could see her face better, that she would look at him.

That he could let her know how sorry he was he’d gotten her into this mess.

Her and Skye, too, if Agent Ward’s story was any indication. Skye’d been seen, her identity excavated from the dark corners of the world wide web, and any hiding places she had would be gone soon. At least she herself had vanished-- why or how Phil wasn’t sure, but she and Kate were _smart_ , most days. Perhaps she’d gone to find Clint.

_Clint._

Phil rolled the name around in his mind, almost certain it would hurt to think of Clint’s broad shoulders, the delight that crept across his face at odd times, the way his blush ran under that full beard, his long knobby fingers running through his shaggy hair…. 

It took Phil a while to realize that his pulse had steadied, and that his heart had climbed out of his throat and was setting back into its normal place in his chest.

_Clint is still out there; it’s not all lost yet. Clint, and Skye, and America-- they’re not going to let us go without a fight._

Natasha would get word to them somehow. 

She might not trust _Phil_ entirely at the moment-- Phil might not be able to read her as intimately as Clint could, but he’d certainly picked up on that through her attempt at a Somebody Else’s Problem field there in the bunker-- but she’d never leave Clint wondering what had happened to him.

Hell, as smart as she was, she’d probably picked up that the only reason he’d let himself be taken away was to prevent the fight he’d felt coming on, growing between her and the Avengers. Being a the rag between two dogs would have been uncomfortable enough in that fight, but it might have sunk the Avengers with SHIELD entirely-- and Fury had made him promise to attempt to stop that. 

Even if he hadn’t, Clint would have wanted Phil to stop it.

And even if _he_ hadn’t, well… Phil might perhaps have gotten a little fond of his team of battered superheros. He wouldn’t forgive himself anymore than Natasha would forgive him, if he let them get into trouble on his behalf. 

Natasha was perfectly capable of getting into trouble on Clint’s behalf, however. She would tell Clint everything (assuming she survived the upcoming whatever-it-was Felix had in mind at Quinn’s warehouse intact). And Clint, being Clint, wouldn’t let Phil be disappeared without a fight. Natasha being Natasha, even if she didn’t trust Phil, she’d back Clint’s play.

They’d be back to the plan they’d tried so hard to avoid, that day when Phil and Skye and Clint sat in the middle of a playground and first plotted infiltrating SHIELD. 

_Prison break._

With little chance, Phil still thought, of actual success. Which meant that they’d end up with adjacent cells in the Fridge. If they were lucky.

Phil would have tried to figure out where it all went wrong, except that he wasn’t sure it actually _had._ Yes, he was captive, headed exactly the wrong way from his team, and from Felix Blake, who appeared to have been harboring some truly convoluted conspiracy theories of his own all this time. And yes, Kate was captive with him, and everything looked bleak enough. 

He just couldn’t spot a point where they’d actively gone _wrong_. And if nothing else, perhaps once he was back at SHIELD he could throw himself at Marcus’s feet and pray Skye and Clint were out there somewhere hacking for all their worth, trying to prove that it was someone-- anyone-- else who’d been the mole in SHIELD.

There was still hope.

Kate shifted again, and Phil got a better glance at her. She was nervous and pale now that there was nothing to do but wait. Adrenaline crash, probably. Her eyes flicked around the little hold, rarely lighting on anything for long, and her hands flexed in her own lap. They hadn’t cuffed her, but the anonymous agent next to her was glaring at her long and hard.

Agents Hand, Amador, Triplett and Ward had disappeared as soon as they got off the SHIELD-issue raft and onto the jump jet that had landed on the sandy barrier island just to the north of North Bar. They’d left the trio of machine gun wielders, in their tac suits and armor, to lock Phil in. Two of the agents were flanking him, practicing their “I’m not a guard, I’m just a force of nature” poses and doing fairly creditable jobs of it. 

The jet had taken off a little while ago. Phil figured he’d see in a few moments if Agent Hand was going to come and chat-- or if she’d decided to wait until they landed. All in all, he decided, he’d prefer she wait.

He didn’t relish the thought of having to face Victoria Hand at all, much less while at cruising altitude, while immobilized and surrounded by her agents. (At least one of whom had garlic breath, no less-- Phil wondered if that was intentional.) It was all psychological; he’d been just as trapped in the bunker back on North Bar, but the hum of engines and the vibration of the hull around him made it impossible to forget that any theoretical escape would need to involve a parachute, a lot of luck, and a thorough dunking.

Hell, even the cheese caves of Orlat had been more hospitable places for him to work his own particular brand of disappearing trick, the one where he collapsed into a mild-mannered, genial, persuasive non-entity.

Of course, waiting until they landed meant going up against Melinda May in an interrogation room, and it made Phil slightly ill to think of it. May was hard as iron, and occasionally as brittle in the cold. That she’d think he’d betrayed her… he didn’t want to. Didn’t want to imagine the pain that would be in Marcus’s-- in Fury’s-- eye, either.

_Well, I didn’t poison Hand at all, so I won’t need to lie. About that. Or about Kate, poor girl. I’ve probably ruined her life, and gotten her friends arrested, with this idiocy. And Skye… I can pretend I didn’t know her. Only Frank Barney did._

Frank Barney. Christ. 

Clint.

 _How long after they start_ really _digging into Frank Barney will Clint’s identity stand up?_

Phil let his eyes drift closed again, trying to recall Clint to his memory in as much detail as he could; his undeniably sexy face, which twisted up until it was weirdly gnomish whenever he was really happy, the golden fluff of his beard, the way he almost trembled when he pulled Phil to him, the feel of his teeth against Phil’s anklebone.

 _I’m sorry, Hawkeye,_ he thought. 

“Don’t be a jerk,” Kate mumbled from across the room. “It’s fine.” She didn’t bother to open her eyes. Phil was glad; that way she couldn’t see him blushing. She was nearly close enough for him to reach out and kick her foot in gratitude, and he just barely prevented himself from doing so.

 _Shut up your inner monologue and toughen up_ now _, Sgt. Coulson. Don’t do your captors’ work for them._

“It’s not fine,” he said, instead, because he owed Kate that much.

“No, it’s a fucking disaster,” she replied, “but it’s not your fault.”

“That’s yet to be determined.” Agent Hand’s voice was as clipped as the snick of her high heels against the jump jet’s floor. She came into the little room with an even tread, her hands in her pockets, and stopped to one side of the door, watching Phil closely. Even from the doorway she was close enough to him that he had to crane his neck to look her in the eyes properly.

Of course, Victoria Hand was not a short woman.

He managed it anyway, returning her gaze with the mildest one he had on file, the one that Marcus used to swear he’d picked up from a cow he’d met in the Maasai Mara. She barely acknowledged it.

Agent Ward came out after her, looking more put-together, his split lip cleaned and his wrists taped. He was still in his tactical gear, and unlike Hand he kept one hand to his holster. Agent Triplett came after him, and went over to Kate, gesturing at her to get up. 

He took her out of the little room, with barely time for a backward glance. Her eyes were wide beneath her fringe. He couldn’t be taking her far, not on a plane this small-- Phil wondered, even, if she was being strapped into the jumpseat of the cockpit. Where else was there?

They weren’t going to throw _her_ off the plane after all.

The thought made him sick for half moment, before he realized that wherever she was, his voice would probably filter through just a little.

 _Well shit,_ Phil thought. _Here we go._

Agent Hand closed the door behind Triplett, her lips curving up as the latch snicked. Then she turned back to Phil, looming in the small space, and stepped forward. The guards faded backwards as best they could in their seats, and turned their heads away.

“Agent Ward has been talking, Agent Coulson,” Hand started, and her smile turned thin as turpentine. “His story is very persuasive. Blake’s been a busy, busy man.” 

“Especially for a dead guy,” Phil said genially, trying to ease himself back in his seat just a little to make following her easier. She snorted at him.

“I talked again to Agent May,” she continued, her eyes sharp on him. “She sent me an image of you from the day you came in to SHIELD to interview.”

 _Goddamnit_ Phil thought. He felt the blood leave his face, and hoped the thin fluorescent light would hide it. _Busted. As Kate would say._

“You were wearing a bug, weren’t you? A tie pin with a bug implanted in back of it, like the ones Agent Ward found in your bunker? The ones belonging to Ian Quinn?”

“Huh,” said Phil, looking from her to Agent Ward, who was looming so closely now that Phil couldn’t see the top of his head. 

_Does SHIELD take average agent height into account when making assignments? This guy should never be on a small plane._

He wondered if it was worth it, in present company, to mention that Felix had used those same bugs himself.

_Probably not a good idea. It’d just make her wonder how I could tell they were Quinn’s._

“That would certainly make you suspicious, if that were the case,” he managed to grind out.

“Combined with the appearance of a known enemy of SHIELD, the hacker Skye, on your island, yes, I think it’s fairly suggestive,” Hand replied. She was as devoid of emotion, as casual of voice, as Felix Blake himself had been. _Must be something they train into you at SHIELD_ , Phil thought. 

“What do you think, Agent Ward?” Hand turned to him, and Ward looked back at Coulson.

“I agree, Ma’am,” he said, stiff as ever.

“What hurts most,” Hand purred, turning back to Phil and stepping forward one pace, “Is not that you attacked me, or even that you betrayed the trust of the Avengers,” her lips twisted upwards, a little wry, “who despite appearances I _do_ have a vested interest in.”

Phil hadn’t ever doubted that, not really. Stark could curse as much as he wanted about her high-handedness, Rogers could continue to cordially dislike her, and Banner could declare she was bad for his blood pressure, but not once had Phil doubted Hand’s commitment to them. 

“No,” she continued, “what hurts me most is what this is going to do to Director Fury, finding out you were using him from the beginning.”

She looked genuinely regretful at that, and Ward turned to her for a moment, confusion and sympathy sitting awkwardly on his face.

“I suppose it would,” Phil agreed, quietly. _And I’m sorry, Marcus. Hopefully Clint will be able to pull this off, and you won’t have to find out._

“You know,” Hand said after a long moment’s silence, so thick it dripped, “those of us who went through the battle against Hydra with him, we loyalists, we’d do a lot to make sure Director Fury doesn’t get hurt further. That he doesn’t have to deal with the betrayal of someone who was so close to him. What do you think, Agent Ward?”

Ward just stared at her for a long, long moment, before he slowly nodded his head.

“I agree, ma’am,” he said. “It would be better for everyone if we could spare him any unnecessary complications.”

Hand walked towards him, click click over the slats on the floor.

Phil watched them both, feeling his heart stutter to a halt in his chest. Hand stopped when she was a few inches from Ward, and reached for his hip.

Phil’s breath caught, as she drew Ward’s gun from his holster, and handed it to him.

“It would be a real shame,” she said quietly, “if Agent Coulson didn’t make it to the Fridge alive, wouldn’t it, gentlemen?”

The two agents on either side of Phil seemed to drift away, just the inch or so their harnesses allowed. Even in the detached, clear space he’d somehow fallen back into during their conversation, Phil heard some remote part of himself-- the part that lived behind his eyes, maybe-- screaming at him. 

_This is absolutely wrong_ it was yelling, but his mouth wouldn’t form words.

And if it could have, it likely would have been Clint’s name, and that would have been a final betrayal the man didn’t deserve.

He was briefly grateful that Triplett had taken Kate out of the room.

Hawkeye didn’t need this on her conscience.

Although-- in a plane this small, and with no silencer on the gun, she’d be bound to hear the shot.

_Oh Kate. Kate, I’m so sorry._

“A real shame,” Ward agreed, and raised his gun, pointing it straight at Phil, so close that had his arm been free Phil could have stuck a finger in the muzzle. “But better for everyone in the long run, ma’am.” 

His index finger slid towards the trigger.

 

**Five**

Skye wasn’t sure _what_ she’d expected, precisely, from a different universe, but it hadn’t been the backdrop of a 1980s New Wave music video. At least, that had been her first impression when America brought them through: all white open spaces, no floor (though her footsteps echoed), strange gridlines in neon colors. The light was glaring, omnipresent, and made them all gaudy, detailed every last line from America’s thick eyebrows to the deep shadows under Clint’s eyes and the soot on his chin.

“Where’s here?” Clint asked, and his voice echoed, as if there were in fact some kind of walls somewhere.

“Doesn’t matter, we’re not staying,” America said, “just tell me where to take us.”

Clint did, and suddenly Skye had much greater worries on her mind than whether she was “about to get ambushed by a Flock of Seagulls. Because Clint had _lost his ever-lovin’ mind._

Or he was a genius.

She wasn’t quite sure. 

Either way, his faith in her ability to talk her way out of trouble, and to be _right_ in her suspicions about the patterns that would emerge from the SHIELD data, if poked, went far past flattering and kinda ended up knocking about _humbling_ territory.

America didn’t seem to share Skye’s gobsmackedness. She merely heard Clint out, said

“I can do that,” and punched again.

Clint was already moving as the gridline shattered in a burst of blue light, stepping through. Skye forced herself into motion, dogging his heels.

This time, they stepped through the curtain of light into a high, modern space, swimming with the sunlight of late autumn. They stepped out of a window-- or a wall, there was no difference between the two in this room high above the Manhattan skyline-- and onto carpet that was, if anything, a little _too_ plush.

Clint came down into the room without a hitch in his stride, and Skye stumbled along behind him. Their feet made faint impressions in the cream carpeting as they followed America, who’d halted in the middle of the room, already scanning it.

“Who the _fuck_ ” someone said from Skye’s left, his voice split between incredulity and frustration. At the same moment another voice, this one unplaceable in space, said:

“I’ve detected an anomaly in the common area. Energy surge and three unknown-- I’m sorry, two unknown signatures and… Mr. Barton?” That voice started out British and clipped and ended up British and slightly perplexed. 

“Hi, Sam,” Clint said, turning to address the voice on the left. “And you, too, JARVIS.” He was still moving as he spoke, making for an elevator bay off to the right as if he expected the doors to open for him before he got there. (Perhaps they usually did, even.) 

Skye turned to follow his line of vision, and was immediately hit by the illustrated dictionary version of the term “discombobulated.” It was plastered all over the face of the guy who was rising from the sofa, or trying to. He was half-thwarted by the large red cast on his leg, and by the fact that he was clearly trying to process about twenty different variables at once. It probably did make gross motor coordination difficult. 

Skye had sympathy with his face; she knew she wore the same look a _lot_ when Clint got going.

Also-- and not for nothing-- this Sam guy (the Falcon, he had to be the Falcon) was definitely _fine_. It did help with the feeling sorry for him bit, even though he was a superhero and could probably take her down even with twice the broken limbs he actually had.

“Barton?” Sam asked, faintly. “JARVIS-- is this really?”

“Yes, sir,” the disembodied Brit said, still sounding rather confused. “It appears to be.”

_Oh my god, it’s the AI. That’s Stark’s AI talking. Holy shit, I’m in the same room as an actualfacts artificial intelligence! Sort of._

“Sorry we didn’t call first,” Clint told Sam. “We’re in kind of a rush. Just here to borrow your computer.”

\----

 

Phil'd long ago learned that your life does not actually flash in front of your eyes when you think you’re about to die-- there is very, very rarely enough time. Granted, it might flash in front of your eyes in the moment that you _have_ died, and your brain hasn't quite caught up-- he'd never gone the full _Owl Creek Bridge_ and coded out or anything. Not like Marcus or-- apparently-- Felix. 

_I'll have to ask him later_ , Phil thought.

Agent Ward's finger snugged down against the trigger and started to tighten. 

_Or... I guess I'm about to find out myself._

In his last moments, Phil was startled to find he was equal parts rage (he'd expected that), regret (also expected), and curiosity. Phil braced, pulling against his restraints. It wasn’t going to do a damn bit of good, but it eased his heart.

Victoria Hand shifted, her gaze switching between Ward and Phil himself with a face of steel and a disturbingly _interested_ glint in her eye, rather like Tasha the chicken would get just before she descended on a hapless beetle and crunched it up.

Ward's soft, deep doe eyes darkened in anticipation, and he pulled the trigger.

 _Click_ went the gun.

Click?

 _Click_?!

After three attempts, Ward stopped trying to get the gun to fire. He tested it in confusion, turning it on its side and thumping against the clip. He was on the verge of stripping it, or so Phil thought, when he finally grunted and held it up. He seemed to have found some small trespasser behind the safety.

"That was a test, Agent Ward," Agent Hand said in a voice that was vinegar sharp. "And you failed it."

Ward whipped his face up to stare at her, and in the moment before he moved to strike, Agent Triplett stepped in the door, reached out, and brought him down with an icer. 

He crumpled to the floor.

"He's been getting tased a _lot_ today," Phil remarked, his filter entirely gone just for the moment. Hand looked up at him. Some of the steel was gone from her face, but he was sure it was a temporary lapse. She hadn’t detained him and brought him here _just_ to test Agent Ward’s loyalty.

“You’d think he’d be watching for it then,” she said.

"You spiked his gun," Phil told her, more so she knew he knew it than for any other reason-- except to have something to keep the conversation going. Even as he spoke he realized he was in awe of the nonchalance of his own voice. _How do I even do that?_

She grunted at him, and turned to Antoine Triplett, who was glaring down at Ward in a fashion that probably would have knocked the guy out all over again, had he been conscious.

"Agent Triplett, please secure Agent Ward in the hold," Hand said, and Triplett saluted her before dragging Ward out by the shoulders.

"One thing Marcus would never thank anyone for," Phil said mildly as he watched Ward's boots disappear around the doorframe, "and that's sparing him any pain."

"It's a good thing that isn't what I'm interested in then, isn't it, Agent Coulson?" Hand looked back at him, idly chipping a flat little device off the gun. Phil suspected it would shoot just fine now.

"What are you interested in?" he asked.

"Information. Grant Ward made a decision," Hand told him, "and it was the wrong one. Whatever agenda he had coming here, his interests don't align with mine. I’ll come back to him-- and Felix Blake-- later, if you give me a reason to do so. But they’re not wrong about one thing: someone in SHIELD has been working with Ian Quinn, and its someone very close to the Avengers."

 _No_ Phil thought, _not wrong at all._ He watched Agent Hand as she stalked the length of the tiny room and back, before ending in front of him.

She looked at the gun in her hands, turning it over twice before setting it next to her on a jump seat. The two guards on either side of Phil shifted, probably watching the gun the same way he was.

"You, Agent Coulson, also have a test,” Hand said, and he looked back at her, to find that her carmine lips had curved upwards in a very cold smile. “You have two minutes to convince me you're on my side."

\----  
To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time on Washed Ashore: Phil explains it all yet again, Skye talks fast, Clint gambles everything, and the Avengers reach the long-foretold Warehouse.
> 
> Two weeks ago, when I last posted, I thought I had this chapter nearly done and would be able to work ahead. AHAHAHAHA. I may be evil to you, dear readers, but I am evil to me, too.
> 
> Remember last week when I said that splitting the chapters saved you from an even eviller cliffhanger than last week’s? The first person to guess what my original cliffhanger was gonna be-- either in the comments or over on tumblr-- gets six sentences from the next chapter.


	23. Engage the Enemy...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pleas, explanations, reckonings-- and traps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: don’t worry, Bruce’ll take care of the chickens.
> 
> Also, for those of you who apparently try to read this story late at night or between classes? This chapter is over 17,000 words long, and it will still be here when you get back from class. I promise. And I love you all.

**One**

“Sorry we didn’t call first,” Clint told Sam. “We’re in kind of a rush. Just here to borrow your computer.”

“You’re here to _what_?” Sam Wilson asked, his voice gone so high he could have joined a boy’s choir. “JARVIS-- tell me you’re getting Stark on the line right now.” 

“No!” Clint snapped, before he could stop himself, and then winced. “Okay,” he said, placing his palms up placatingly and speaking to his disembodied listener as much as his embodied one, “I know it looks bad. I know.”

He was repeating himself, he knew he was. In his defense, nothing else quite seemed to cover the way he and Skye and America had just popped in from another dimension, walking out of a hole in the day and straight into Avengers Tower.

Sam pulled himself to his feet, stumping and shifting as he attempted to find an adequate defensive pose. This being Sam, half of it was probably for show, his own damn version of dragging a broken wing away from the nest.

“You coming in here just as soon as everyone’s gone hunting? Hell, you _alive_ and you didn’t fucking contact _Natasha_? Hell yeah it looks bad, Clint.”  
_At least he didn’t say anything about SHIELD… or calling them. But I guess their liaison is off on North Bar now, huh?_

“Well, yeah, we’re here _because_ they’re on North Bar and-- okay, that sounds even worse. But just… gimme _one minute_ to explain before you call Stark or the cops or anything all right?”

Clint held up his hands as he plead, and tried his best to look harmless, despite his generally scruffy appearance and soot-streaked jeans. He wondered if he wasn’t ending up way over the line and into tipsy frat brother territory.

Sam just stared at him like he was out of his goddamned _mind_ , which… probably was an accurate assessment from where Sam stood. Stumped.

“Okay, Sam?” he asked when Sam continued to fail to answer. And then, for good measure, added “Okay, JARV? After that, I swear you can take me down if you want.”

Behind him, Clint noticed that Skye had not waited for him before she got down to business. She was already looking for a spot to plug in her computer or some way to interact with JARVIS-- which was really the wrong way around; JARVIS would let her know how he would interact with her, whenever he got around to it. Approximately half the surfaces in the room were chargers. You’d just lay an item down on it and bam-- charging. Also, bam-- data uplinks. (And the one time Thor had set Mjolnir down in the wrong place, bam-- blackout. He, Tony, and JARVIS had a rather tense three-way conversation in the aftermath of that incident.) Clint didn’t have time to enlighten her at the moment, and anyway, he wasn’t sure how compatible it was with her system.

_I don’t suppose that was ever a concern of Tony’s. Damnit._

America had faded into the background behind a potted lime tree of truly spectacular square footage. She disappeared surprisingly well for someone who appeared so blunt of words and fists. He supposed that was how she got away with hiding in plain sight.

The lime, his brain insisted on telling him, was new since he’d left. Or rather, it had come inside from the balcony, where it had been soaking up pollution all summer long. An entire eight-foot sectional had been rearranged into a conversational nook beneath it. It might have been the sectional he remembered from the other side of the room, but if so it had been reupholstered-- he would not have forgotten copper corduroy. 

The lime was messing with his sightlines. His brain was starting to scramble, trying to figure out if maybe he’d just _forgotten_ the sectional, or whether Tony’d mentioned he was going to be redecorating. (Or more accurately-- whether Pepper had mentioned it.)

The back of his neck started to prickle.

 _C’mon, Barton, pull it together. Two months ago this was still home. It hasn’t changed_ that _quickly, right?_

“One minute?” Sam repeated, stumping forward another pace, watching Skye even more warily than he was Clint. 

She cursed under her breath, then straightened up and glared back at Clint, one eyebrow raised, clearly waiting for him to fix it for her.

“One minute,” Clint repeated firmly, and did his best to appear entirely unthreatening. 

Sam was new, like the lime, like the corduroy and the orchid-print cushions. Sam hadn’t been wandering around with his broken leg like he owned the damned place two months ago. The Falcon was part of Avengers Tower's post-Hawkeye era, where Phil belonged and roamed the halls, and Clint was an intruder in a very real and unwelcome sense.

_Come on, Sam, if this was Cap and Nat, you’d have invited them in to breakfast by now._

But he wasn’t Captain America, and he knew it. 

Sam glanced at his face, his eyes snagging on the beard. Clint fought the urge to rub it. 

_Yeah. New beard, shirt that gives away where I’ve been hiding, as well as the general state of my six-pack; I’m not exactly loaded for bear here, Sam._

Sam didn’t rush his review, and he didn’t give anything away-- at least not ‘till his gaze flickered momentarily Clint’s arm. That earned a helpless sort of snort from Sam, who closed his eyes for a moment as if the irony of the world-- and specifically the Avengers-shaped corner of it-- was too much to bear.

_Oh, right, it looks like my arm is ready to go in the refrigerator as leftovers._

Saran wrap, the height of medical technology.

It was the saran wrap that turned the tide, though-- Clint watched it go. Sam opened his eyes again, looked at it almost in despair, and shook his head.

“All right,” he said. “One minute. No more.”

\-----

"You, Agent Coulson, also have a test,” Hand said. He looked back at her, to find that her carmine lips had curved upwards in a very cold smile. “You have two minutes to convince me you're on my side."

Either the jet’s canned air had suddenly gone through a refrigerator coil, or she’d actually raised goosebumps on his arms with just one little leer. Phil wished he could believe it was the former. He licked his lips as he fought to make his brain-- or at any rate his mouth-- work again. 

Two minutes.

Two minutes wasn’t anything like enough time to tell a story, true or otherwise. Being locked into a tiny scratchy, uncomfortably straight-backed jumpseat next to two guards, one of which had seemingly decided that halitosis was a valid method of interrogation, only upped the degree of difficulty.

Hell it wasn’t even worth asking what happened at the _end_ of two minutes, because two minutes wasn’t enough time to process the answer.

Hand was already staring at Phil impatiently, as if he should have started babbling the moment she shut up. Did people really fall for that? Just short out at the thought of so little time and regurgitate all the secrets they’d been keeping in their craws? Promise to do everything in their power that she asked? Without thinking about what happened if she didn’t _like_ what they gave her?

Did she honestly think _he_ was going to fall for that? 

“Time’s wasting,” she said, her foot tapping once against the metal grating of the floor.

His brain clicked over.

Well, hell, it was as good a place to start as any.

“What _is_ your side?” he asked, tilting his head and trying to pull together the tattered remains of his innocuous agent shell. Hand shifted. Her smile grew wider, in a kind of twisty, invasive, bindweed sort of way.

“What’s my side?” she parroted back at him. “That’s how you start?”

“Well, yeah.” Phil shrugged-- or tried to, against the straps holding him to the jumpseat. 

Two minutes. Pah. It was more than twice as long as he’d had at Orlat. (He pushed away the thought of all that cheese, blasted to smithereens around them.) 

“Before I can convince you I’m on your side, I have to know if it’s a side I _want_ to be on.”

“You know, Agent Coulson,” Hand said quietly, “most people, when faced with the prospect of being shoved out of a jet going five hundred miles an hour, wouldn’t be quite so picky.”

“Perhaps not," Phil heard his voice go gentle, deadly kind, “but I am.”

Halitosis Guy, next to him, stiffened a little, and Phil got a temporary reprieve from stale garlic as the man forgot to breathe. He took it as a sign to keep going.

“You yourself said that there’s a corrupt SHIELD agent out there. One who’s been working with Quinn. _I_ know there’s more than one. And one of my prime suspects just took Kate Bishop out of this room. ” Phil leaned forward again, straining as hard as he could against the straps, so that he could lok Hand directly in the eyes. “So understand me, please. If you’re the other one, if you’re working against Marcus? You may as well just toss me off of this plane right now.”

He saw her face fall, completely blank, for a moment before she pushed off the side of the bulkhead and took two quick strides over to him, forcing him to tilt his chin far back to maintain eye contact. 

“Or else you’re the corrupt one, Coulson,” she hissed, “and that’s just you bluffing, telling me what you think I want to hear. Hell maybe you are-- because otherwise only a fool would think Antoine Triplett was capable of betraying SHIELD.”

“Triplett’s your man, not mine, Hand,” he shot back. “All I know about Antoine Triplett is that he was the only person besides my own friends who knew that Kate Bishop visited my island to shoot. He was the only person in New York who could connect her back to me. 

“And three days ago her father showed up, with Ian Quinn in tow, threatening her, because of her connection to me. So if Triplett didn’t leak it to them, who did? You? Because to me, it looks like you’re the next likeliest suspect. Or were you _not_ the one who sent him to suck up to me, bring me suits, and spy around my island?” 

“That doesn’t--” She shook her head like a dog shaking off a bee, finally looking rattled. “I can check that, Coulson. You know I can. If that’s--” she stopped again, looking at the little closed door and then back at him. “He wouldn’t. He’s has far more opportunities than you have to turn coat if he wanted to-- the man is well-nigh incorruptible. It’s what makes him so useful. No, _he_ of all people wouldn’t betray Fury.”

“Would _you_?” Phil kept his voice soft. 

Hand’s only answer was a returning smile, this one worse than the other, and a little chuckle. 

Ah, well. That was that, then. Not… not what he’d expected, given how certain Clint had been that Victoria Hand had not been behind his betrayal. Rather confusing, actually, but he supposed he wouldn’t have much time remaining to consider it.

Phil closed his eyes for a moment, against the bile building up in his stomach. 

It was one way to end this, he supposed. 

“Better find a door and toss me out of it, then,” he said quietly.

“Oh but you haven’t heard my offer yet,” Hand purred. “It’s a good one.”

He was sure it was. Hell, it was even tempting-- _really_ tempting, buy a few more minutes for him to save himself, save Clint, save Kate. 

_Kate._

Except that Victoria Hand was nobody’s fool. If she was actually willing to betray SHIELD, to betray Nick Fury, she was far too smart to trust Phil for an instant. Whatever her offer would be, he couldn’t imagine her letting him off leash at all. Whereas there was a bare possibility-- remote, but there-- that he could twist away from the guards on the way to being heaved out of the plane and… and… do _something._ Or that she had something else in mind for him, and he’d be able to escape on the way to whatever it was.

Anyway, lying really wasn’t his specialty.

“I can’t think of anything that would tempt me, frankly,” he said, tired. “Not that you would buy.”

“How about Kate Bishop? She goes home, we forget all about her. Otherwise,” Hand gave a delicate shrug. “She’s… inconvenient.”

“She’d thank you for saying so,” Phil said. _And she’s going to hate me for saying this-- but she’d hate me more if I didn’t._ “And I’d prefer you not kill her. She’s no threat. But she’d be the first person to kill me if I tried to save her skin by allying with Ian Quinn.”

Hand blinked, and cocked her head.

“My god,” she said, “you’re both idiots.”

“Yeah,” Phil allowed. “It’s been said. You going to show me to the door now?”

She stood staring at him for a moment longer, her hand over her mouth, shaking her head just a little. Finally, just when he was about to snap and growl at her, she waved a hand at him.

“Let him go, boys.”

They did, Garlic Breath fumbling a bit as he released Phil from the cuffs, the Other Guy pulling his seat belt off, as if Phil was a toddler being taken out of a booster seat. Phil stood and resisted the urge to pop his back or chafe his wrists. His head was reeling. Half of him was waiting to be grabbed by the arms and shoved towards the door.

The other half of him was buried in a growing sense of admiration for Victoria Hand.

“Cute,” he said finally, when she had just stood there watching him for a half minute, her smile beginning to leak out from the sides of her hands. “Someday, though, that’s going to get you into trouble.”

“Someday,” she agreed. “But it got us through the Hydra uprising all right, Felix Blake and I. You’re not out of the woods yet,” she said just when Phil started to relax a little.

“I figured,” he said. “But I’ve earned more than two minutes, I think? And an end to the little games for now?”

“You’ve earned more than two minutes, yes,” she said, “and a chance to meet our pilot. You can tell _her_ the whole story.”

“Her?” Phil asked-- but really, on reflection, he didn’t need to guess.

There was a footstep just outside the cockpit door, a very deliberate footstep, the kind of artificially loud clomp used only when announcing one’s entrance.

Agent Melinda May stepped through, clad in black from head to leather jacket to thick-booted toe, her face smooth and featureless as obsidian. There was no little person laughing behind her eyes, this time.

“Hi, Melinda,” he said, “sorry about missing lunch today.”

She just sighed. 

\----

"I truly am sorry that you had to find out about me this way," Felix Blake said, and he plopped down in the co-pilot's seat next to Natasha. 

"You want to have this talk _now_?" Natasha asked him, pulling one hand away from the Quinjet's controls to wave it around the cabin. The sweep of her hand took in everything from the instrument panels to the comms to the expanse of water and low marshy land in front of them, speeding ever closer with each minute. 

The warehouse turned out to be within cuddling distance of North Bar, hidden in an abandoned fertilizer factory on an island midway between Gansett and Atlantic City. The site was surrounded by salt marsh and scrub pine, and satellites showed that a road had once crossed it and attached it to the mainland. It was so close that they weren't even going to reach cruising altitude-- it was a go-up come-down affair. Tony'd put his armor on, so he'd asked Natasha, by default, to pilot. 

It wasn't the time or place for awkward and potentially explosive discussions with recently undead ex-supervising agents. The only conversation Natasha was interested in having was one with Bruce, but that wasn’t going to happen-- they’d left him back on North Bar with the chickens. 

He’d volunteered to stay, citing fear for the well-being of the chickens and the dogs, left with no one to care for them.

"Bruce," Tony had interjected, his voice coming hollow from inside his Iron Man mask, "you're not seriously worried about chickens at a time like this?"

The ensuing argument had proven-- at least to Natasha-- that Bruce’s concern was only partially about poultry, and more than partially about their keeper and his assistant hacker. He’d come far too close for Natasha’s comfort to some fundamental questions like _what about that Frank Barney guy_ and _who is he anyway_ and she’d only barely managed to steer them clear of the shoals of _what’s his role in all this?_

Steve and Tony had both been reluctant to split the team further-- as had Blake. 

"Trying to sneak into a warehouse containing who knows what delicate equipment and bringing the big guy himself along is maybe not the best idea,” Bruce had replied, with admirable understatement. “And as for me, I was going to wait on the Quinjet and give you back up if you need it, but otherwise I don't think there's anything my research can help with immediately. Can any of you honestly say there's nothing here you would want me to investigate?"

He’d won, eventually, obviously, since he wasn’t on the ‘jet.

Natasha was trying not to feel panicked at the thought of him alone on the island with the chickens and the dog and whatever was in the cottage that they hadn’t cleared away. She could only hope that Bruce had caught all the silences in the things she and Phil had been saying and doing, and understood them to be protective, not guilty. 

_He’s most likely to understand why Clint would have stayed away, even if he’s innocent. Hell, he probably would understand better than I would. Yes. Yes, maybe it would be for the best if he stays._

The last she’d seen him, Bruce had been disappearing down the little path that curled around the outside of the island, taking him down to the haphazard cottage Clint had been holed up in for these last few weeks. She’d followed him down the ramp, taking in one last look at North Bar, glowing nearly too perfectly in the hazy noon light, every last twig and blade of dune grass sharply delineated.

Worry-- for Bruce on the island and Clint fighting his fire, for Phil and Kate hijacked by Hand and for Skye wherever she might be-- was filling Natasha’s brain full to the brim. Playing head games with Felix Blake was not high on her list of desires at the moment.

"I want to do this now, yes,” Blake told her. “I'm afraid I won't get a chance to talk to you like this, after." 

It was back, the regret that had tinted Blake’s voice in the Tower. It still stood out like a flat that should have been sharp, one false note making the song painful to listen to. 

_Fine_ , Natasha thought. _I suppose I’m trapped._ She grunted her assent.

"Thank you," Blake told her. "I am sorry, Natasha. I really am. Not being able to tell you and Clint... it hurt. I missed you both. I--" he looked out the window briefly-- "I hope it didn't affect Clint so badly that he... made poor decisions."

"But you wouldn't cross Fury." Natasha made it a statement, not a question. "Not even for us."

"’Trust the system.’ The SHIELD mantra. Fury had his reasons," Blake said. "More than I realized at first. Do you know how long I was dead?" 

The question was startling. She double-checked her altitude, even though she didn’t need to, to cover her shock.

"About forty seconds," she said. 

Blake laughed. It had a hollow sound, like it was occurring in an echo chamber.

"That's what I was told. And it's all I would say with Phi-- with Coulson around.” 

His head was cocked in the old familiar way, telling her a story about his younger, stupider self as he occasionally used to do. Clouds sped by behind his head, out the Quinjet’s windshield.

“I thought it was true,” he continued. “I couldn't understand why it felt wrong. Why I kept trying to make it longer. Why I felt so... off. So unlike myself. But I knew I couldn't go against Fury's orders until I knew why he made them." He shrugged. "So I... investigated. I'll spare you the details. But I found out my memory'd been altered. Natasha--" 

He said her name like a plea.

"I'm sorry," she said, and she was. She who had never danced at the Bolshoi, despite her clear memories of sitting splay-legged in drifts of tulle behind the curtains offstage right, staring into the blinding stage lights and waiting for her cue. 

"Thank you. You of all people-- thank you.” Anyone else might have touched her hand there, but Blake knew her better than that. “I did eventually get my own death and recovery file. And do you know how long I'd been dead, Natasha? Eight days." 

"That's not--" Natasha swallowed hard, her insides gone to ice. 

_That's not possible. That's not natural._ But they were superheroes and this was SHIELD. Those words lost their meanings easily. 

"What did they do?" she finished instead.

"Even now, I don't know entirely, Natasha," Blake said. "They're still hiding the procedure from me. I asked--" His voice broke a little. Natasha whipped around in alarm.

No-- it was still him, not some imposter. She'd just never quite heard that sound from him before.

He noticed her looking, and gave her a rueful little smile. 

"I really have missed you, Natasha. If only they'd let you be with me, instead. But I understand. You wouldn't have... I wouldn't have wanted you to see some of it. They weren't sure I'd come back right, you see. No one else had. Not without a memory wipe."

"SHIELD was experimenting?"

"SHIELD was experimenting-- would you have expected otherwise? Valuable service, resurrection, if you can make it work. Fury said that the agent in charge thought it wasn't ready for use yet-- they'd retired the survivors, after the memory wipe. Sent them off to nice suburban homes or lowertown lofts, I suppose-- whatever it is we do.”

Blake wasn’t quite looking at her at the moment; he’d taken to idly poking at the controls, running his hands over buttons and wiping smudges off the displays.

“Sounds cozy,” she said, just to say something.

“It probably was, but I didn’t get to find out. I was the first time they'd tried to reintroduce somebody into SHIELD... after. So they needed to be sure. I think.. I think the agent in charge may have downplayed a few things he shouldn't have."

"What things, Felix? Who was he?" 

Natasha felt her skin crawl-- had he been Hydra? Had they found out too late? Was Blake worried about what could be crawling in the dim recesses of her-- his-- brain?

"Ironically," Blake said, "he was me."

 

**Two**

 

 _One minute_. 

Of course, _of course_ , Clint’s brain totally blanked as soon as Sam gave him the time he’d asked for. Where the hell do you start when you’ve got one minute to be convincing?

Thoughts passed in a frantic flash, jumbling against each other in their hurry to get through.

 _C’mon Sam, you know me, we half took down SHIELD and Hydra together._

But Clint had fought together with Steve and Tony and Thor and Bruce and Nat, too, both at the Triskelion and in the long days after-- and lived with them in this very Tower in some kind of messed-up superhero fraternity. Yet, faced with the prospect of trying to convince them to support him against Agent Amador’s accusations, he’d jumped out a window instead, because of this very issue. 

One minute wasn’t nearly enough time to convince someone to trust him against the entirety of SHIELD, against all evidence. Might not even be enough time to convince someone to just back _down_ and listen.

With Phil, it had been the product of weeks, not days, not hours or minutes-- and Clint had slipped in under Phil’s defenses, essentially, before Phil knew who he was harboring. Skye had already been skeptical of the available evidence, and desperate to convince them of her own innocence. No inspiration to be found there. Kate had come on board because of a dream-- Clint hadn’t convinced her, her own illusions about Hawkeye had. And to the extent that the rest of Gansett Light was on his side, it was because of Phil, not him. Clint was merely riding on his coat-tails, mostly unrecognized. And Nat-- his dear, deadly, frustrating Nat, who along with Phil was probably halfway to the Fridge by now or god knew where else-- she’d needed far more than a minute and just himself. She’d needed an entire dance and an entire town.

Which was not a luxury he had at the moment.

“You didn’t have a speech ready,” Sam said, breaking into Clint’s thoughts, and he whipped his head up. There was already a look of frustrated awe on the guy’s face, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Jesus, Clint.” 

“What? You know me,” Clint shrugged, just going with it, “I tend to think on my feet. Or off them-- and in midair, right?” 

Sam shrugged his agreement, and gave him a kind of “carry on” gesture, pausing briefly to glance at Skye. She’d stopped to watch Clint, leaning back against a table with her laptop cradled in her arms. Clint winked at her and she glared back.

_C’mon, Skye, sometimes you just gotta let go and fly. You know that._

“So here’s the thing,” Clint said, straightening and just letting the babble roll off his tongue, “we both know I’m a selfish jerk sometimes, yeah? ‘Cause I am. And yeah look I didn’t do it-- any of it-- but I can’t convince you of that in a minute because that’s why we’re here in the first place-- like I’d be stupid enough to come anywhere near JARVIS and the Tower if I weren’t desperate.

“Thing is, we really can prove it, with your help. And you’re gonna say ‘great, we call SHIELD, you prove it to them’ except here’s the thing Sam, if SHIELD decides they don’t care, or if they take too damn long before they’re satisfied-- and let’s face it, they’ll take forever-- then we’re screwed. We’ve got friends in trouble and we wouldn’t be here if we had any time left to stick our thumbs up our asses and twiddle.”

Sam just _stared_ at him, like he’d just been caught streaking through Central Park or something. (Which was wildly unfair. If Clint ever _had_ done something like that-- and he wasn’t admitting to anything-- he would not have been caught, damnit.)

“C’mon, man,” Clint said, trying to remove both groan and whine out of his voice. “I know I’m not exactly Captain America, but you don’t have to feed us breakfast or anything, you just have to hear us out.”

“Good,” Sam said, shifting at last to lean against a pillar, “‘cause it’s at least lunch time and I’m not a short order cook.” He sighed heavily, scrubbing his face with his hands and pulling half the tension off it. “You’re right, you are a jerk.”

“But am I an effective jerk?”

“Yeah,” he said, and Clint found a new definition for grace at the look on Sam’s face, half-frustrated, half helpless. “Yeah, you are-- of course you are, man. For the record, I can probably even manage a sandwich or two while you and JARVIS talk.’”

“Sam, thank you,” Clint sighed, deflating now that he had time to do so, feeling the loss of adrenaline begin to chill his stomach, “I can even make the damn sandwiches myself. Anyway, I don’t need to talk to JARVIS.”

“You don’t? But you said--”

“Not me. Her,” Clint jerked his head over at Skye. “I told you. Skye’s the mastermind of this op, I’m just here to do the introductions and make lunch. JARVIS, if you’re willing to trust us, can you tell Skye here how to get on the network? She’s got a lot of data for you, stuff from SHIELD’s servers that Tony couldn’t hack his way into.”

JARVIS had been conspicuously quiet all this time, and Clint figured that he had, among other things, been trying to track down anything he could find on Skye-- which might be next to nothing, or might be her entire life history, including the Rising Tide. He’d also no doubt calculated the odds she could introduce a virus he couldn’t beat and monitored whatever was going on with Tony at the moment to make sure Skye couldn’t undermine _that_ from here. One thing JARVIS was not, ever, and that was cavalier with the security of the Tower. He had more than enough autonomy not to wait on Sam’s word for anything, if he didn’t want to.

“Sir and I have never met a SHIELD system we could not, eventually, conquer.” JARVIS sounded skeptical, or possibly intrigued. “What are you suggesting he missed?”

“Not much,” Clint said, casually. “I mean, literally, not that much. It’s just that SHIELD isn’t completely stupid. When they want to hide data from everyone-- even their own hackers and even Tony, not to mention the Hydras and the NSAs and the Rising Tides of the world, what do you think they do?”

There was a long pause, while Clint waited for JARVIS to respond.

“Several strategies come to mind,” JARVIS said at last, parsing possible answers. “Paper files, or internal networks unconnected to anything outside the physical space they are stored in. I doubt you accessed paper files; what are you saying you have from these networks?”

“Security data,” Skye said. “Passcodes swiped, all entrances and exits from all duty stations in SHIELD since the fall of Hydra. Enough to prove that someone other than Clint _could_ have been the ones accessing Quinn’s files and other confidential material. I’m, like, part-way there myself, I mean I don’t _really_ need your help figuring this out, except it’s kinda urgent. And it’d take me days but you… well you could find it in, like, five minutes flat, right?”

Sam hissed, either because he’d just stood straight up and put unwise pressure on his injured leg, or because he’d seen the implications if Skye and Clint were right. Being Sam, and a sharp motherfucker, Clint would have bet he’d also realized just how difficult this information would have been to come by.

Hell, he probably had already figured out what Phil had been doing at SHIELD.

“Can you make it seven minutes?” Clint asked, deliberately not paying attention to Sam as JARVIS remained silent. “I need time to make sandwiches.”

“That is all you’re asking for?” JARVIS asked. “Seven minutes of my time?”

“To start with,”Clint said, watching Sam with what he hoped was an open face, even though he was speaking to JARVIS. “If you find it and you’re convinced, buddy, I think we might be asking for a lot more help, very quickly.”

“It’s clean,” Skye piped up, looking upwards and around-- trying to find something to stare puppy dog eyes at probably. JARVIS’s sources of visual input remained obscure. Even after so long in the Tower, Clint wasn’t entirely sure where they all were. Skye seemed perfectly content to cast her pleading face over as broad a band as possible.

“The data’s clean, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she continued. “I mean, I know, I know, plugging in a strange drive for the first time gets kind of scuzzy, and mine especially doesn’t look like much, I mean it’s not a Starkpad or whatever. And you don’t have a lot of reason to trust me right? But it really _is_ clean, and anyway you’re Stark’s life so you’ve got to have, like, the firewalls of a _god_ or something. I promise I wouldn’t mess up the purity of your design with obsolete equipment without good reason.”

“I am only as good as my programming, Ms Skye,” JARVIS said, and a portion of the table next to her lit up. “But Sir is very thorough. I am certain I can compensate for any deficiencies in your hardware. Please put your laptop down on the space indicated, and I will begin transfer.” 

Skye was already fumbling her laptop open and setting it down on the table as he finished speaking. He paused, and then Clint was certain he heard JARVIS’s voice curl a little on the end as he continued.

“It has been a while since I’ve gotten to meet a strange computer, especially one so meticulously modified-- and it was not originally supposed to be pronounced ‘scuzzy.’”

Skye laughed, and Clint glanced sharply at her, suddenly suspicious. She was blushing.

“Damnit, JARVIS, stop flirting with my hacker,” he yelped. Skye flushed harder.

JARVIS chuckled.

Sam put his head back in his hands and collapsed against the pillar.

“Welcome home, Clint,” he said, muffled by his palms. “I think it missed you.”

\----

The worst part of the waiting was that neither Clint nor America seemed at all worried about the outcome.

While Skye had sat hunched over her laptop, watching data flash across her screen, cascade down onto the table, and then kinda haze into the air before disappearing again in a continuous desktop fountain of information, Clint himself had done as he’d promised.

He and had collected Sam’s crutch from where it had lain unregarded on the couch, and they had disappeared from the room. America had come out from under the enormous potted tree she’d been hiding beneath, and trailed after them at the same polite distance a bodyguard would use.

They had, as promised, been talking food. As they went through the door, Clint had been praising the pot pies at the Blue Peter in a way that Skye was certain would make even the hardest-hearted Hungry Man-nuker drool. Sam Wilson, the Falcon, besides being incredibly hot and very patient and just as over Clint’s habitual underestimation of himself as she was, was also clearly incredibly fond of food. He’d been fascinated enough by a second-hand description of a pot pie that he hadn’t even interrupted Clint to demand the story of his exile.

Or maybe he was waiting ‘till they hit the kitchen. Whichever; Skye was just glad America was tracking them so she could concentrate on worrying about what JARVIS would find-- or not find-- in the data. She’d explained more about what she was looking for now that she had him hooked-- and maybe she was a little eager to defend her inability to find it on her own. 

Explaining about the IDs led to explaining about the warehouse. Explaining about the warehouse involved explaining Quinn, which backpedaled into talking about what had led her to North Bar in the first place. By the end of it, she’d dumped practically her entire life story into the AI’s listening, non-judgemental lap.

After the first bout of confessions, she hadn’t even tried to stop whispering-- after all, the more he knew, the more he could maybe help pull all the strings together. That she used to console herself during late night bouts of loneliness in the orphanage-- or later in the back of her van or wherever else she’d landed-- with the hum of the computers she’d cobbled together, or by letting slow sequences of the code lull her to sleep, didn’t enter into it at all.

So Skye felt she had a right to be nervous. All her life, all her work, was floating about in his processing centers now and who knew what he’d make of it, of her? Or if he wouldn’t find anything, after all, if it was all a mirage. 

If she’d just failed her bosses and the trust they’d put in her, the trust America had put in her.

“JARVIS?” she asked at last, because he’d gone silent early on in the process. “How are we doing? Any progress? It’s… been four minutes.”

“One moment, Ms Skye. I am having another conversation with Mr Barton that is going to intersect-- all been confiscated,” he finished, in what was somehow an entirely distinct tone of voice, without really being any different at all.

“What do you mean ‘it’s all been confiscated?’” Clint shouted, his voice breaking on the last word like a middle-schooler just discovering the treachery of testosterone.

He burst through the double doors back first, balancing two plates of sandwiches on top of two tall glasses of milk (if she’d needed proof he was an Iowa boy, she supposed she had it right there). He headed straight for her, not even bothering to turn and look.

“After your rather abrupt exit from the building, Mr. Barton, Agent Amador proceeded to remove your equipment for examination.” Polite as the tone was, Skye got the distinct impression that JARVIS regarded the whole affair, from Clint’s leap to SHIELD’s reaction, with distaste. She wondered whether he objected to what he perceived as flawed logic, or to the logistical mess it must have entailed.

 _How does an AI assimilate instinct, anyway?_ Skye shook the thought out of her head-- she had far bigger things to worry about than the epistemological and metaphysical conundrums created by Tony Stark’s masterpiece. 

Their time was nearly up, and JARVIS hadn’t said anything, not even a “this warrants further study.” 

“She had no damned right, those were all mine-- goddamnit, she probably left them all in an evidence locker somewhere, and the tension’s all messed up now.” Clint put a glass down next to Skye’s nose without looking down, then removed the plate from it, dropping it right next to her hand.

Sam and America trailed back into the room after him, Sam still hobbling along on his crutch, America holding their glasses and balancing both their plates along her arms in the approved waitress fashion. They sported nearly identical milk moustaches. Between the sight of them all relaxed and chatty and her ranting boss, who was practically purple behind his beard, Skye started to detach a bit from reality. She felt a giddy, groundless sort of feeling begin to well up in her. 

_It wouldn’t hurt if_ one _of you were a little worried about this, guys._

“You know,” Sam told Clint slowly, sitting down on the couch and accepting his sandwich from America with a grin like melted butter, “there _is_ always the Met. I mean, you got the right back-up here.” He indicated America with a thumb, which earned him the kind of glare that would have reduced other men to puddles of flop sweat in the middle of a pile of clothing.

Clearly he _had_ gotten the entire story out of Clint, while Skye was over here going all confessional at an AI.

“So,” Sam asked, unconcerned by America’s glare, “what’s up with your work, Ms Skye?” He sat forward, letting his elbows rest on his knees.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, putting down the half of the turkey club that she’d _just_ decided to eat on the grounds that maybe it would help the light-headedness. “I haven’t seen anything I can recognize in… a while.”

“Seven minutes are pretty much up though,” Clint said, setting his own sandwich down on an end table and coming up to peer over her shoulder. His hand was heavy on her back, rock steady. “Or better than, even. JARV? What’s up?”

“If you need more--” Sam started, but Skye cut him off.

“Seven minutes was padding. Processing power like his? The sheer… _scope_... of him? He should have had this in the first couple minutes, if it was there to find. I’m not.... Maybe I didn’t have enough data? Maybe we didn’t get a full enough dump from the servers? America and I could try and pop in and out of SHIELD to get more? If we do it fast enough they maybe wouldn’t trace it to us. I’d have to grab the lighthouse from the van, but that--”

“Hey,” Clint’s palm pressed down, stopping her short. “No. JARVIS? C’mon, man, you were chatty enough with me earlier. You’re worrying the lady.”

“I… apologize, Ms Skye,” JARVIS’s voice said at last. He was as subdued as she’d ever heard a computer be, and she’d once gone head-to-head with a souped-up dual-core bad boy and his owner (Miles, he of the chicken), and beaten them to cracking an Interpol server using just her phone and her two thumbs. 

“It’s all right,” she said, though it wasn’t at all.

“I have been slightly preoccupied. I chose not to begin explaining until I had finished my analysis, predicting that the uncertainty would be frustrating to you all.”

“Your analysis of what?” Skye asked, because he sounded positively _chagrined_. She wasn’t even sure where or how you’d begin to comfort an AI, but if he’d had a back, she would have patted it, the way Clint was rubbing tiny circles in hers. Anyway, it was still a good possibility that the chagrin was because he’d been analyzing the safest way to get them all arrested and nothing she’d given him added up.

“My analysis of my own failure.”

Clint’s hand stopped rubbing.

“Okay,” Skye said, after everyone had paused long enough to let that sink in, dread settling from crown to toes and right through into the double-plus plushness of the carpet. “Can you give me a little more?”

“One moment. I… am doubting the accuracy of my own sensors. Mr. Barton, can you confirm that you have seen Agent Felix Blake, alive? Outside of the confines of this Tower? He is, in fact, still on active duty with SHIELD?”

“Yes,” Clint said, and Skye felt his hand on her back twitch. “At least, I saw him on a video camera on North Bar, and Phil saw him in person at SHIELD.”

“JARVIS, what the hell,” Sam piped up, leaning forward from his position on one of the copper-colored couches. “Blake was here. This morning. In this room, even. You talked--” he paused. “You didn’t speak up at all while he was here.”

“There are,” JARVIS said, “certain deficiencies that come with being an artificial intelligence, although Sir has dedicated a great deal of time to, as he says, hunting them down and eradicating them. I fear we have come up against one such shortcoming.”

 _What the hell kind of_ shortcoming _could something as magnificent as JARVIS have that’d be so drastic he’d be this apologetic?_ Skye shivered despite herself.

“However, thanks to the extraordinarily thorough work Ms Skye has done-- with some rather significant handicaps, I might add-- I believe I have the full picture at last.”

“Oh good,” Clint sighed, but his tension radiated through his hand and into Skye, “just what we’ve been needing.”

“Precisely,” JARVIS replied. “Having all the evidence allows us to construct a course of action.”

“That’s great,” Sam drawled. “And what course of action are we constructing?”

“To begin with, Mr. Barton should make a visit to Sir’s third workshop, the one dedicated to projectile weaponry. Agent Amador seems to have overlooked a prototype recurve that you and Sir were working on together.”

“Well that sounds like a vote of confidence.” Clint leapt up so fast Skye nearly heard a whoosh as he stood. America pushed away from her table to follow him. She thought about doing so herself, but for some reason her limbs had temporarily stopped responding to her brain’s commands.

Relief had turned them into jello.

_This is why they’re the superheros, and I’m the one who fiddles with computers._

“I would ask that you move quickly,” JARVIS continued, “I have been attempting to alert Sir and the Avengers for the past 72.5 seconds, but to no avail. I’m afraid they may be in considerable danger.”

It was Sam who finally reacted, throwing up his hands and falling backwards into the couch.

“Typical,” he said. “Just typical.”

**Three**

“Gum?” 

Kate looked up to find Agent Triplett leaning over the back of the co-pilot’s chair, holding out a foil-wrapped plank of Doublemint.

She shook her head, trying to swallow down the lingering nausea. It was easier to breathe, even strapped into the jump seat that backed against the cockpit’s door, now that the glowering figure of Agent Melinda May had turned the flight controls over to Triplett and left. She’d passed so close that Kate was sure she’d felt a cold breeze go with her.

To be fair, Kate hadn’t been breathing much in the last few minutes anyway, ever since Triplett had separated her and Phil Coulson, bringing her through a narrow no man’s land between the hold and the cockpit and strapping her in with a firm hand and apology in his face. 

The woman in the pilot’s seat had looked back and stared at her with dead eyes, impassive as any of the myriad women at her father’s cocktail parties who’d judged and found her wanting from her knock-kneed grade school days on up. Kate had thought of her bow, of America, both of them glowing and golden, and held the images close behind her eyelids, trying to block out everything else.

“We’re supposed to watch her while Hand deals with Coulson,” Triplett had said, and she heard him slide down into the seat in front of her. The threat implicit in that “deals with” had sat oddly in the pleasant tenor of his voice. 

“Hrmph,” said the woman, who Triplett then introduced to Kate as Agent Melinda May.

Phil’s battle buddy. The one, Skye had explained to Kate in the dozy days that had followed their initial frantic effort to turn Clint fully into Frank Barney, who Phil had scammed into giving him an entré into SHIELD. Once there, it had turned out that his even-older battle buddy was Director Nick Fury himself, and Melinda May was the one who’d alerted him Phil wanted to come in. No wonder the woman was acting like a stone-faced prune.

Kate would have been a little pissed at Phil, too, if she’d been in May’s place, piloting a plane that had come to sweep him off for interrogation on the suspicion that he’d betrayed them. Of course-- she’d have been a lot more pissed at herself, for being played.

After introductions had petered out into silence, Agent May had flipped a switch on the instrument panel above her head. Victoria Hand’s voice had come tinnily over some set of in-plane speakers, smoothly prodding Agent Ward into _disposing_ of Phil, and Kate lost any sympathy she might ever have felt for anyone on the plane not named Coulson or Bishop. 

_No. Oh, god, no, no, nononono._

Both Triplett and May ignored the little steam whistle of agony that escaped her-- they were both intent on the drama going on in the hold, listening as Hand’s suggestion took effect on Ward. Triplett slipped out just before she heard a thump on the floor and Agent Hand’s voice declaring that Ward had made the wrong decision.

Agent May hadn’t looked back at Kate’s shuddery sigh of relief, but she thought she caught the ghost of a smile crossing the woman’s face. It wasn’t a pleasant one.

Hand had gone _on_ and Agent Triplett had come back, settling into the chair with a grunt and explaining he’d hogtied Ward and dumped him in the cargo space, and Kate had to fight back the urge to ask him if he’d done the neck loop.

She fought even harder against the urge after Phil told Hand how Triplett had passed news of Kate on to her father, and Triplett’s back went stiff in the seat. 

_Yeah, how about that, smooth guy?_

In the midst of the sickening dread and rising hope that tugged at her as Phil’s conversation went on, she heard Agent Hand say:

“How about Kate Bishop? She goes home, we forget all about her. Otherwise, she’s… inconvenient.”

 _Yeah, thanks, I always knew that was gonna go on my tombstone._ Perhaps he should ought to have been afraid, but somewhere in between the crests and troughs of her emotions, she’d been left floating on a raft of pure, low-simmering outrage. It was a pretty poor way to run an intelligence agency, she thought, all these stupid little loyalty tests.

“She’d thank you for saying so,” Phil had replied to Hand, and Kate had forgotten herself so far as to mutter

“No I fucking wouldn’t.” 

Triplett did glance back at her, at that. She thought he laughed a tiny bit in spite of himself, small as a rabbit’s sneeze.

“And I’d prefer you not kill her,” Phil had continued. “She’s no threat. But she’d be the first person to kill me if I tried to save her skin by allying with Ian Quinn.”

_Damn right. Slimy asshole._

She must have made some kind of noise, because May had looked back at her, one thin black eyebrow lifted in inquiry. Kate lifted one right the fuck back, straightening her back and doing her best to imitate Natasha Romanov’s queenly glare, seen once and etched on her brain. 

_Gonna go out, go out swinging. Right on, Phil._

Of course, it had been yet another damned test-- seriously, at some point it had to be more efficient just to set them all down with some freshly sharpened number twos and a bubble sheet-- and apparently Phil’s reward for passing this one was to have Agent May herself go interrogate him.

And Kate’s reward was gum.

Well-- and to have May pop her cuffs off her, as she went out, but still: gum.

“You sure?” Triplett asked her, letting his smile widen and speak for itself. _I’ve been here too,_ it was saying, _Nothing like the minty freshness and snap of a little bit of rubber and xylitol to pep you up._ Kate snorted.

She did not need _pep_ at the moment, she needed to be able to hear what Phil was _saying_ out there, and if he was pulling that stupid-ass “Kate Bishop is so amazing her merest disapproving glance set me on a new path” story that had somehow worked on the Avengers.

As it turned out, he was not saying that. Not… _entirely._

Oh no, he was implicating _Skye_ this time, telling the story of finding her in his secure bunker a few weeks after the storm, and how she’d been trying to prove Ian Quinn was the slimiest bastard ever to slink across the surface of the earth.

Not that Phil put it quite that way.

“So you have a strange girl show up in your bunker and you decide to… help her infiltrate a government agency to prove her theory that a billionaire is using her hacktivist squad to cover up some kind of massive illegal activity?” 

That was Hand… beyond the first growled “start talking,” May hadn’t bothered to say anything to Phil.

Phil, that traitorous jerk, was correcting the fearsome Agent Hand by bringing Kate into it. Again.

“Well… only partially. The rest was Hawkeye-- I’m sorry, you’ve met Kate Bishop, right, Melinda? Tall girl, dark hair, got stashed around here somewhere? Agent Triplett outed her to her jackass father? That one? Anyway, she’s the one with the bow, from the Met gala. Or did her Dad not tell you that part?”

Phil proceeded to tell them that part, anyway.

Kate glanced up at Triplett against her will. What she expected to see, she wasn’t sure-- was it too much to ask for a hint of _some_ kind of shame? (But what would he be ashamed for? Being a… a… _tattletale_? He was a SHIELD spy, and she was just a spoiled rich kid who had awesome aim.)

Triplett just looked kind of confused, though, mouth caught in mid-chew, and tilted his head like Lucky when he was trying to pretend he had not at _all_ intended to chase that chicken, why would you think that of him? Except that Triplett seemed far more sincere than Lucky, and Lucky had _epic_ ‘innocent widdle puppy’ game.

He must have noticed her staring, because he sent her a little shoulder shake of denial.

 _I don’t believe you_ she glared back.

His answered her with a full body _not me_ shrug, hands held open and eyes wide. 

Over the speaker, she could hear Phil imply that _she_ was the one who’d made them suspicious that someone had framed Clint-- although really all he said was that Kate herself had been certain Hawkeye’d been set up. If so much hadn’t depended on it, Kate thought she would have wanted to rewind the whole interrogation so far, just to admire the facility he had of burying the truth under other truths.

May was talking now, her voice too low for Kate to catch her words. Phil’s were clear enough, though, and they started:

“Let’s face it, Melinda, this is not the worst thing I’ve done to you during our acquaintance.”

It was apparently the wrong thing to say, since he quickly followed with:

“I _am_ sorry. I never meant it to go further than interview.” 

“And when Director Fury asked you to become the Avengers liaison? When Nick _trusted_ you with the single most delicate position in SHIELD?” May’s voice was still even, still smooth as stone, but it had heft now. “You just went along with it? To do what, Phil? See if you could manage to compromise us _even more_?”

“No.” 

The long pause before he spoke was the only indication Kate had that there might have been some kind of exchange of gestures or glances. She was suddenly desperate to be able to see him, them-- the whole thing. 

“No, Marcus asked me to try and hold them together. And, well, what the hell else was I supposed to do, faced with a request like that? _Not_ try? I was already trying to find out who’d framed Hawkeye, it wasn’t much of a stretch. Melinda… I don’t have hidden motives here. I think keeping the Avengers from falling apart or from turning against SHIELD is important. I think finding out what happened to Hawkeye is important. And I’m enough of an adrenaline junkie with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility to try and do it all on my own. Well-- okay, with help from some remarkable young women and a man who admires me more than I deserve.”

 _This is, like, his_ third _fabulous mostly-true-tall-tale and I haven’t gotten to_ see _a single performance. I feel deprived._

Triplett must have been feeling a little deprived too, because he shuffled in his seat, as if he wanted to get up.

“You’re the one flying the plane,” she hissed at him, and he grinned. It was a knee-melting grin; wide and white-toothed and challenging.

“It’s on autopilot. Flying itself right now. Wanna go see?” 

Before she could decide whether she was more eager or reluctant, his long fingers were at the buckles to her seat, and he was pulling her free and up to her feet.

“Fine,” she muttered. He put a hand over her mouth, so fast she didn’t have time to bite. He shook his head, then pulled his hand away, to lay a finger over his lips.

 _FINE_ she mouthed at him instead, and he winked.

He opened the cockpit door then darted through the tiny space between bulkheads to ease the inner door open just a hair. Kate slunk through behind him, keeping low, and wriggled her way into his space. Triplett put one hand to her back as they crouched. 

Agent Hand was talking now, her voice relaxed in a way that said she was somehow, against all odds, actually half convinced that Phil was neither insane nor out to get them. 

“... was only a limited number of people it could be. You were our most likely suspect, frankly-- Until Melinda came to me yesterday. She asked me if Felix Blake had been by. Apparently, Director Fury had worried about his reactions to their meeting after you spotted him. Was worried he might be less resigned to losing the Avengers than Fury had thought.”

“And?”

Kate could just spot a thin strip of Hand, wandering back and forth in front of the door, black-clad from high heels all the way to the top of her sleek head, the little magenta lock of her hair flashing like a beacon as she walked.

“And I contacted Agent Morse, his XO on the Bus,” May said, coming into view for a brief moment, another, shorter, all-black flicker. “He and Agent Ward had been off on private missions with increasing frequency lately. Always with an excuse that checked out, orders from somewhere. But that?” A shrug. “Orders are easy to come by, if you know the right people.”

“God knows Felix always did,” Phil said softly. “His ability to get people to order him to do what he was going to do anyway was impressive. So you narrowed it down to me… or him.”

“Precisely,” Hand replied, in a preoccupied voice that suggested she was examining her nails or picking lint at the same time. 

“But you thought it was a good idea to leave him alone with about half the Avengers to bring me back for interrogation, while they wander off and confront Ian Quinn based on Blake’s intel?” Phil asked, his voice deadly mild.

Triplett froze next to Kate, and she glanced over at him. He looked _stricken._

Maybe Hand felt the same way, because it was a long time before she responded.

“They’re superheroes, they’d better be able to take care of themselves for a few hours,” she said at last. I needed to isolate you now, before you got warning. If it was him, he was already warned. But I was determined to get the truth out of _one_ of you.”

“Got something,” Phil muttered.

“Well, you came with willingly,” she snapped back.

“It was that or risk the Avengers deciding to unfriend SHIELD entirely, given your actions.” She realized she’d never really heard Phil annoyed before-- not even when she was accusing him of various crimes against superherodom at the pub, or of being a tattle tale at the dance. He was so patient that it didn’t even sound like _him_ when he lost it.

After a moment, though, he relented with a sigh. 

“You think it’s Felix? Really?” 

There was a slump, out of Kate’s vision, that sounded like someone sitting heavily. 

“I hope it’s not Felix. Really. It could be Agent Ward. He was... “

“Recent evidence suggests that he knew more about Agent Garrett’s activities with Hydra than we’d thought, given that he fought with Felix to save the Hub,” Melinda May broke in. “It’s possible, it’s quite possible, that Ward was playing Felix all along.”

The silence was so profound at that point, from all three of them, that Kate turned to Triplett and poked him in the really quite solid bicep. He looked a question at her, and she gestured to the door, as urgently as she dared. If he didn’t let her go, she was gonna fake a loud crying jag or scream-- something, anything to get someone to come get her.

Luckily for her dignity, she was spared the need to go into histrionics. Triplett just nodded and pulled the door open, straightening as he did. Kate, leaning against the crack between door and bulkhead, fell forward into the little room, sprawling on her knees and elbows.

Agent Antoine Triplett bent down to heave her upwards by her armpits, chuckling as he did.

Kate fought down her embarrassment, in favor of sweeping the room.

Phil was standing up and his hands were free too, so they must _really_ have decided he wasn’t an immediate threat. He’d had his hands in his pants pockets, and had frozen midway through pulling them out, to stare at her. Agent Hand was the one sitting in the jumpseat now, next to one of her guards. She dropped one hand from her forehead as Kate watched, and looked up.

Agent May, who was closest to the door, spun on her heel, her fists already up and ready. She didn’t put them down until Triplett had Kate entirely on her feet.

“I hope you caught all that?” Phil asked, after a long silence in which they all stared at each other. Unflappable motherfucker that he was, he sounded just as aggravatingly polite as he had that night in the bar.

The night that now, apparently, was supposed to have inspired some kind of seismic shift in his motivation, thanks to her and Skye. 

And really, seriously, the other three in the room had _bought_ it-- at least as a working hypothesis.

Kate was about to growl at him, when her butt and Coulson’s left hip both went off at the same time, buzzing and tinkling merrily away. 

_Oops._

“Agent Triplett,” Agent Hand said, from her seat, watching them both, “did we not confiscate those?”

**Four**

Natasha curled into a corner of the catwalk, the rusted iron weave of the floor digging into her palms, and missed Clint horribly. High up in the rafters, where a building developed little eddies and currents of its own and sounds rose in weak little streams of bubbles, Clint felt at home. She did not. This was merely a place she passed through on her way to her native shadows, not her chosen perch. Now, though, she was stuck for a little while. And she wasn’t alone-- Felix Blake was curved so closely against her back that his breath was warm and a little pungent as it moisted across her cheek. 

“Are they in yet?” he asked, his voice too soft to be properly called a whisper. Nat shook her head minutely.

“I haven’t heard anything on comms,” she said, and shifted a little, trying to ease the cramp in her calves. “Not since Iron Man walked up to the door.”

Tony had volunteered to be the distraction-- and there was no denying he was the logical choice for the job. He’d left, to go be a shiny object, daring the cats to swat at him, before they’d landed the quinjet out of sight on a low hump of land next to an artificial drainage channel.

He flew over the compound in haphazard circles, buzzing low over what appeared at first glance to be a set of long, low, crumbling metal-roofed warehouses, half open to the weather at the ends. That illusion was superficial only; clearly meant for satellite more than man. Up just a little closer, several of the slips were in decent enough repair to handle small motorboats and one looked like it could manage larger ships. A long ramp set with wooden rollers disappeared into the water along one end. It would have been more than possible for Quinn to send a tender from yacht to dock to unload without anyone noticing the larger ship concealed among the islands. 

Over along the far end of the cleared area, a rusted water tower and two large, entirely brown, metal storage tanks squatted. Those had clearly attracted Captain America’s attention, to the extent that Natasha hadn’t bothered to react at all when he abruptly cut off his whispered conversation with Agent Blake, yelled

“See you inside!” and leapt, with shield but without parachute, for the ground. 

Blake had made an extremely amusing choking noise. Natasha had just rolled her eyes, made sure she had eyes on him as he landed in a roll and dove behind the cover of those tanks, and then concentrated on landing while the captain himself disappeared into the dilapidated warehouses. He was going to find Ian Quinn, while Iron Man occupied whoever answered the front door.

Meanwhile, Natasha and Blake, finally on the ground themselves, had slunk through the scrub pine. There was no fence at the edge of the cleared ground, but they did have to dodge two scruffy-looking men who came wandering by, theoretically performing a perimeter patrol. In reality, they were arguing in low voices about a fantasy football team, heads down, hands nowhere near the triggers of their semiautomatics. Despite the army surplus camo, they didn’t look like much-- but then, that could have been very intentional. 

They gave the patrol a wide berth and made it to the warehouses. Underneath the crumbling roof a smaller and very definitely secure facility had been enclosed in walls of concrete and steel. Natasha and Blake avoided those, climbing two stories up into what was left of the rotting rafters, then squeezing inside through the gaps left where old and new construction met oddly. 

Their objective was the superstructure that Blake had identified as control and computer rooms, situated on the second level and overlooking the interior of the warehouse floor. It would be their job to take any hidden defenses offline, open all the doors, and generally lay the warehouse open for the Avengers to ransack, if necessary, in their pursuit of Quinn’s secrets. They’d gotten as far as the catwalk before stopping, waiting for Steve and Tony to check in.

“I don’t like this,” Blake said now, a quiet voice in her ear, and Natasha nodded. She shifted forward a few yards, past the last set of newly-constructed walls that had turned the place into a building within a building. The catwalk finally brought them above the main warehouse, with a birds-eye view of the whole expansive floor laid out beneath them. 

It was not what she’d expected. Apart from several palettes of crates dotting the floor, mostly lined up near the large bay doors that fronted the seaward side of the warehouse, almost the entire expanse of concrete floor was empty. The floor was polka-dotted with large lighter spots and equipmentless-cables strewn about where multiple segmented machines clearly used to live. It was a ghost of a factory now, but a factory it had clearly been-- though she had no idea what for. Blake’s intelligence had been right-- Quinn was clearing out, and quickly. 

She noted all these things, and the roof of the control room about fifty yards away and eight down, merely in passing. Mostly, she was focused on the little man-sized door that had been cut out of the two-story tall loading bay doors along the far wall. It was open, and Iron Man was standing in it, gesticulating wildly and slowly pushing back two coverall-clad workers.

“Lovely place Ian’s got here,” he was saying in the suit’s booming modulated voice. “Can you find him for me?”

Natasha turned to raise her eyebrows at Blake, and tapped her in-ear comm. He frowned, pulled his out, wiped it down, and tried it again. 

_Nothing_ he mouthed at her, and she closed her eyes. So the comms were down-- that explained a lot, and raised far more questions.

Downstairs, Tony was still grandstanding in the name of the feint, trying to draw out as many workers as he could.

“He said drop by any time, and I was in the area for work anyway so I thought I’d pop over. He has something really special here, I have to say. I _love_ what he’s done with the docks. The camouflage is great; you almost can’t tell that there’s an entire underwater substructure that can raise on hydraulics. Classy, and has to please the local historical district review board, right? Gives it that real vintage look. Distressed, isn’t that what they call it? You can charge a _lot_ for that. And I should know. I keep thinking I should distress the suit-- what do you think? A little sanding along the thighs?”

Tony was gesturing to his metal-clad thighs as he talked, pointing out the best places to fade them, and Natasha bit back a laugh. The two workers followed his gestures, so bewildered it was obvious even from two stories and half a warehouse away.

“Yeah, maybe not,” Tony decided. “So. Ian Quinn. Your boss. Where is he?”

“Right here, Stark. How nice of you to drop in.”

Ian Quinn sauntered out from whatever back rooms sat underneath the control room, his hands in his pockets, his cravat a red nearly as shiny as Iron Man’s pate. His voice, too, carried up into the rafters, still as slimy from that great distance as it had been up close. 

And that was a sign something was deeply, _deeply_ wrong, since Cap should have taken him out back in his office, nestled under the superstructure-- several minutes ago.

“Shit,” Natasha hissed, and heard Blake’s answering hum behind her. 

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Tony said, stalking forward so fast he nearly bowled over the workers still trying desperately to block his way. They swung the little door shut behind him, and Natasha tried not to feel like a trap was closing around her.

“So what brings you out here?” Quinn asked, still standing stock still in the middle of the open warehouse and letting Tony come to him.

“Little of this, little of that,” Tony said. His face plate was up, but given the angle and distance she couldn’t tell if his face was as offensively relaxed as his voice.

“Ah. And here I thought you were looking for your friend,” Quinn said, and Tony froze.

“What?”

_Oh hell._

“Your friend. We found him in the back room just now-- I thought maybe you’d come to pick him up. You seem to be the one delegated to do that, when I find Avengers snooping around my property. But if you don’t want him, I can just have him disposed of.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Tony snapped.

Quinn, who clearly had the heart of a gaslight villain, just bounced on his heels, then swept a hand behind him.

“This guy. Know him?”

The day, which had already reached a highly unacceptable of surreality, took yet another downward turn on its spiral out of control. Captain America came limping out from under the heavy shadow of the superstructure, guarded closely by three more of the ubiquitous men in surplus camo, with their large weaponry and close gait. 

“Okay, you honestly think three men are enough to hold Cap back?” Tony asked, incredulous. “What did you do-- what did they do, Cap? Say please and thank you? It’s only mannerly, I know you get off on that kind of stuff. Is that it? You were just being polite?”

“Maybe,” Steve replied, his voice curving into something that had to be a smile. “I wanted to try this the easy way first.”

 _That little shit,_ Natasha thought, her heart rising. This was the Tony and Steve she’d given up anything to fight beside-- it was wonderful to hear them again. She prepared to leap down to the control room as soon as the fun started. 

“Wise choice,” Quinn cut in. He was so utterly open and sincere that alarm bells went off in Nat’s head. “Now, please leave, or I’ll have to have my colleagues here throw you out.”

 _It can never be easy, can it? Never just_ one _time when there isn’t a hidden minefield that we only find by stepping on it?_ Clint would have laughed at her for even having the thought.

“No,” Captain America told Quinn, just as evenly, “I really don’t think so.”

“I was _hoping_ you’d say that,” Quinn smarmed. 

He stepped backwards, two fast strides that put Captain America between himself and the range of Iron Man’s weaponry.

 _Oh goddamnit_ Natasha thought, and set her grappling hook in the edge of the catwalk.

One of the soldiers on the floor moved, striking at Cap. For his troubles, Cap caught him by the wrist, pulling him close and pinning him to his chest. At the same moment, Cap rammed backwards with his shield arm, to take out the other soldier.

It would have worked too, if that soldier hadn’t ducked. On the return swing, the soldier grabbed Cap’s shield, yanking it straight off his arm. Meanwhile, the soldier he was holding by the waist jerked himself downwards sharply while grabbing at Cap’s shoulders.

Cap tumbled off his feet, tangled up in the falling soldier. He came up fast, his head going straight into the breadbasket of the soldier who’d grabbed his shield, ramming with enough force to kill a weak man and definitely break the ribs of a strong one. This soldier, though, merely staggered backwards a step, one arm around his stomach, and dropped the shield. The other two heaved Cap off him and Cap twisted, trying to free himself.

He nearly pulled his arms straight off, but the soldiers remained steadfast, and then one kicked out the backs of his knees, sending him to the floor. Another kicked the shield, and it skipped across the uneven floor, clattering to a stop under a palette. Steve’s grunt echoed in the rafters.

Iron Man had been busy himself, taking out two men who were running at him from oblique angles. A quick pulse from his palm thruster knocked one of the men back into the other, bowling them both over. That distraction gave the coveralls enough time to jerk a large oil drum off one of the remaining palettes and send it rolling at Iron Man. He leapt it, and it continued on harmlessly off into a far corner, bouncing off the wall with a hollow thoom.

Cap was still surrounded, too tight for Iron Man to risk a projectile without getting him hurt. Natasha had to get down there, try and take one out, give him room to maneuver. 

In the chaos, Quinn had retreated a little bit, and two soldiers had come up to cover him. Iron Man found him, now, and held his hand out, fist down and arm guns up. 

“Stop this now, Quinn,” he growled. “This doesn’t end well for you.”

“Are you so sure of that, Mr. Stark? _These_ are our own version of super soldiers. Fine men, the pinnacle of modern technology. Suits of armor are so medieval, don’t you think? Chemistry and cybernetics, that’s all that powers these bad boys. Much like, well… like your friend here.” He gestured to Cap. “Well… if you merged him with you. Only we’ve gone much further. We’re _replacing_ parts, not just wrapping them up in fancy foil suits.”

 _Super soldiers. He was… how did he…_ It was worse, even than Skye had thought, than any of them had expected. How the hell had Quinn kept all this hidden? 

_He had someone in SHIELD. You already know this._ This was _far_ beyond Clint’s ability to hide-- and it would have made him sick to try. At the least, she could take comfort in that.

 _No. Relief later. Fight now._ There would be time to untangle the conspiracy later-- for now there was no time for anything but getting Cap free and getting them out of here.

“Felix, I’ll take the soldiers, you get the contro--” Natasha stopped whispering mid-sentence, as her spin brought her face-to-face with nothing.

Blake was gone, disappeared as thoroughly as if he had never been there at all.

Well fine then. She’d have to do the control room _and_ save Cap’s ass.

 _C’mon Clint, pass me some of your luck_ , Natasha thought, gripping her grappling line tightly, and shifting at the edge of the cat. _Let me fall, let me fall, let me fall._

She did not fall. 

She did, in fact, make it on to the roof of the control room, and from there down the side to the open catwalk that ran its length. Hell-- she even managed to break into the room itself before everything went to hell around her, as was usual when one invoked Clint’s luck.

The room held at least three other super soldiers-- and Felix Blake, nearly hidden in the middle of them. As Natasha stared, she heard the clump of boots behind her, and turned.

Two more of the damned menaces. Up close, she could see where braces like metal centipedes with topaz trunks rode the tendons of their underarms, spidered down to the backs of their hands, and slight ridges suggested where they crawled up under their shirts. 

One of the two had a long metal cuff over his forearm, and as he raised it, a small blue light winked on, and he aimed it at her. Whatever the hell he’d been weaponized with, Natasha suspected it would be just as nasty, if not worse, than her Widow’s bites.

She put her hands up.

They brought her out onto the catwalk proper, where she was visible to everyone on the floor below.

“Hello, Miss Romanov!” Quinn called up to her, gaily. “I was really hoping to never see you again.”

Down on the ground level, next to him, Iron Man blasted up into the air, re-focused on Quinn and prepared to shoot-- 

And his armor fell off.

\----

“Okay, JARV? Buddy?” Clint froze, looking up at the ceiling-- not that JARVIS really came from the ceiling, he’d just gotten into the habit long ago. In his lighter moments, he thought it made him look like he was talking to the voice of God. “What are you talking about? What danger?”

“I apologize. ‘Unpack,’ as Ms Potts tells Sir when Sir is being less than clear. Your Ms Skye gave me certain parameters to search for, to prove that a cohesive group of people within SHIELD could have impersonated you. I did. I also found the warehouse she was looking for. My analysis is not 100 percent conclusive, but as circumstantial evidence goes, it is very strong. Moreover, I suspect that Agent Blake was not incorrect-- a search of the warehouse might well provide the final data points needed to confirm matters.”

 _Maybe not a god, but I’d at least believe he’s an angel, right now_ , Clint thought. His knees gave out and he sat down, hard, on the floor, his ass saved from bruising only by the high pile of the carpet. Skye watched him go, incredulous. He blinked up at her, unable to do more than give a drained grin. 

“Good work, kid,” he managed to whisper. The smile she beamed back at him could have been seen on a pitch-black night from far out into the Atlantic. Hell, he’d have believed that, too-- it’d saved at least him from drowning. 

“Back atcha, boss,” she said. 

Clint gave himself a half moment to bask in the knowledge that he hadn’t let her down, after all, before he turned his eyes back JARVIS-ward.

“So tell us about the danger?” Clint asked, heaving himself to his feet, with America’s hand hovering underneath his elbow to help him.

“I can either take you through the analysis at this moment, or give you the data you need to deal with the danger itself. The same agents who framed you are working hand in glove with Mr. Quinn who has, I believe, been warned that the Avengers are on their way.”

“You told Tony?” Sam barked, leaning forward and following Clint’s gaze upwards. 

“I attempted to contact Sir, and the other Avengers. All except Dr. Banner are blocked.”

“No one should be able to block you from Tony’s suit except Tony himself,” Clint snapped. 

“And yet,” JARVIS said, “it has been done, and by an outside source. Their last known coordinates put them just outside the area I pinpointed for the warehouse. A trap is being sprung even now, I am afraid.”

Clint’s first worry, sadly, wasn’t for Nat or Tony or Steve or the Avengers in general, it was entirely for Phil. It felt like a betrayal, to worry about an ex-Ranger black-ops badass holding his own in any fight but Phil, like Clint, was only human. 

Clint felt his spine snap into place, straight as a lighthouse itself. 

_Well that was a nice five seconds of relief._

“You’re right, explanations can wait ‘till we get on the road. JARV, open the door to Tony’s lab, I gotta grab my bow and a something for the girls. America, Skye, come with me-- America can punch us out as soon as we’re armed.”

“Hold up a second,” Sam growled, and grabbed at Clint’s tight sleeve. It nearly brought him off the couch. Clint turned and blinked. “Two things, man. First thing is I don’t think you’re the only cavalry we can send.”

“Oh yeah?” Clint whipped his arm free. “You’re free to contact SHIELD. Go for it-- in fact, it’s a good idea, JARVIS-- but they’re never gonna get there in time.The only SHIELD agents near the scene are--” he broke off, since it wasn’t entirely clear yet what JARVIS thought Felix Blake was. Clint was beginning to think he had an idea, though-- and it wasn’t a good one.

Until JARVIS said otherwise, he wasn’t going to bring up Blake’s name, anyway.

“Coulson and Blake? Not quite. I was listening in to the audio feed with JARVIS, before you got here. Once they landed on North Bar they went into this kinda bunker thing, and the signal cut off-- but Agent Hand was there when they came out. She has your man, and she thinks he’s a traitor to SHIELD,” he told Clint. 

The news hit Clint square in the diaphragm, driving all the breath out of him. He didn’t even bother to ask how Sam had seen between the lines of Clint’s story about washing up on North Bar and inveigling Phil into conspiracy, to where Phil’s brilliant smile and bare toes lurked in the background. 

“Aw, fuck, boss,” Skye whispered, and Clint had to agree.

“She’s got _your_ girl, too,” Sam said to America, who blinked. 

“That makes no sense at all,” America said. Sam gave her a long, rather dry stare, and she blushed. “On second thought,” she said, sighing, “it’s just typical. She did something stupid and self-sacrificing again, didn’t she? Okay, so we gotta get them first?”

“No,” Clint cut in, because he saw exactly where Sam was going with his crack about the cavalry. “This is exactly why we came here in the first place. Skye, send JARVIS the numbers for our burner phones. JARVIS, give ‘em the elevator speech version: me, good; Quinn, bad; Avengers, in trouble; and the warehouse coordinates. That should be enough to convince Hand to give you a call and get the full version, anyway.”

“I had already taken the liberty of sending the data to Agent Hand’s smartphone, but I will do so now, yes,” JARVIS said, then he paused. “And Ms Skye, if you would be so good as to put your own phone down on the table, I believe I can provide a way to feed you with data as you travel.”

“Between warehouse blockers and the route America’s gonna take us on, I’m not sure of that, JARVIS, but we’ll try,” Skye said gently. “I hear the multiverse doesn’t quite have fiber yet.” 

“Multiverse?” Sam asked, then cut them off with a raised hand when they all opened their mouths at once. “You know what, nevermind. I’ll get the story later.”

“Okay. Bow time, then go time,” Clint said, trying to drag them all back onto topic. “And we get to the warehouse and--” he petered off.

“And?” Sam asked, clearly amused.

 _Well fuck. Why the hell do I have to learn to plan in advance_ now _?_

“And we… rescue some superheros,” he concluded, feeling lame. _Need to do better than that, Hawkeye. Aren’t you supposed to be an Avenger?_

If it were just him, he’d never have stopped to think before running off, as he’d confessed to Skye and Phil what seemed like a lifetime ago, in the tacky booth of the Blue Peter. If all had gone as it usually did, he probably would have decided a plan of attack could have been useful the second after a girder gave way under him or the goons spotted him.

When he’d headed teams, though, Clint reminded himself, he’d actually managed to do the planning thing pretty well. Hell, he’d even managed to take out most of a Helicarrier once, though granted he hadn’t been feeling entirely himself at the time.

Okay. Bad example. He looked over at Skye and America. Hacker and bruiser. Not bad for a start.

“You need backup, man” Sam told him, following his glance, and Clint snorted.

“That’s why JARVIS is contacting Hand, so she and Phil can fly to the rescue.”

“No, I mean _you_ need backup. On your team.” He jerked his thumb at the girls.

“Nice offer, Sam, but you’re not getting out your wings while you’ve got a broken drumstick.”

“I didn’t mean me,” Sam snorted. “I meant my useless roommate. He’s been scratching the walls on me, trying to pretend he doesn’t want to go beat someone up. Take _him_. Shouldn’t take you long to get to Harlem if you go by weird blue space tunnel.”

Roommate? Sam didn’t have a… oh.

Oh, well. 

“Yeah, sure,” Clint said, shrugging, and trying to shove down the traitorous part of him that whispered Steve was going to _kill_ him. “He’s got a chicken named after him, already-- he’s practically part of the family. Okay. We grab my bow, we grab Bucky, and _then_ we go to this warehouse, right?”

“Right,” America said.

“Schematics?” Skye asked. Sam winked at her, and Clint tried not to feel ruffled.

“Fine. Bow, Bucky, Schematics, Warehouse. Is that all right with everyone, or would someone like to add something to the list? Fruit, if it’s on sale?”

“Nope, boss, we’re good,” Skye told him. “Grab your bow and JARVIS and I will make sure the data gets where it needs to go. I’ve… got an idea.”

Skye was already turning back to the glowing table, placing her smartphone on it and beginning to mutter to JARVIS. It was an enthusiastic conversation, and Clint tried to use it to burn away the tension that was knotting his jaw and back and neck.

_Nat, Tony, Steve, we’re comin’ to get you, don’t worry._

_I just hope we get there in time._

 

**Five**

 

As supervillain speeches went, Natasha supposed she’d heard worse. It still made her grate her teeth, though, as these things always did. How unprofessional, to monologue away all one’s secrets at the first provocation.

She’d come fairly quietly, testing her captor’s grip only the once before she shuddered and went still. The soldier’s hands were still flesh, she was nearly certain, but they were as cold as Bucky’s left arm-- and far less yielding. 

Once he had her with Steve and Tony, Quinn hadn’t bothered with anything so civilized as restraints. Two of the soldiers held her, three Steve. Tony, reduced to a sleek black shelled shrimp without his suit, was being held by a single soldier. He wasn’t paying much attention to Quinn, at least as far as Natasha could tell-- he was far too stunned.

He rubbed his wrist, once, when Natasha glanced over. It looked innocuous, like he was still in pain from his six-foot drop to the floor, in the midst of all his armor. However, the motion dislodged the flat silver control bands that circled both wrists, once, then twice. 

It might, she thought, be a signal-- or even a working hypothesis. _If Quinn has a control band… or if he got one long enough to study and replicate it... that would explain how he managed to shuck Tony like a crab._

If he had gotten his hands on a control band, however, it could only be in one way, and that the worst: they had, indeed, had a traitor at the tower. 

More than that, Quinn had been waiting for them. He’d _wanted_ them to come find him.

 _That_ was moderately obvious even without hypothesizing traitors, given the sheer quantities of glee the man was radiating as he paced in front of them. He was practically strutting back and forth across the warehouse, waving at empty spaces where large equipment used to be, describing each missing piece with loving gestures. 

The Amputation Station, the Injection Chair-- the prototypes used to build and refine the next generation of cybernetic warriors, he’d said. 

“And you did this all by your little self?” Tony asked, his voice gaining a little life as he did. He seemed as disgusted with the thought that Ian Quinn had pulled all this off as he was by the idea itself. Perhaps more-- this was Tony, after all. “C’mon, Ian, you’re not a scientist, you’re not even an innovator. You’re an investor. Who were you working with?”

Quinn shrugged, temporarily diverted from his rant.

“”Do I want to tell you, or do I want you to figure it out? I mean, if you have time to figure it out before I kill you. Heh. Let’s just say I represent a controlling interest in a joint venture. A joint venture that sees a need going unfulfilled, and an emerging monopoly that isn’t fully satisfying the market.”

“An emerging monopoly on what-- oh, for fuck’s sake.” Tony spat. “Stark Industries you mean.”

“Almost, but not quite. Privatize world peace, you said, Stark,” Quinn told him, and wandered forward far enough to poke him in the chest. “Not by selling your weapons, just by being you. All of you, Avengers. But why is that? Why only one Iron Man? Why only one Captain America? The need is _so_ great, and you are all so small. SHIELD was brought to its knees, pruned ruthlessly, and you stepped into the light, but you can’t be everywhere at once, not even close. You’re a boutique operation, when what we need is a production line.”

“Okay, first of all, you forgot Rhodey. You know, the Iron Patriot? It’s not usually a good idea to forget Rhodey. Second of all, what do you even mean? You thought you could step in and, what? Replace us? Super soldiers for hire?”

“No, super soldier making _machines_ for hire. Soldiers sold separately.” Quinn spun on his heel, waving his arms to point out spots on a map that hung only in his mind. “We’ve got interested backers from the Pentagon to the Kremlin, from Caracas to Beijing. That’s not even mentioning the private firms.”

“How nice for you,” Tony ground out. “And I suppose we’re supposed to be flattered that you’re trying to make a fortune selling generic knock-offs of us.”

Quinn snorted at that, as if he couldn’t believe Tony thought he’d do anything so very mundane.

“Don’t flatter yourself; we’ve been at this for longer than you have. The Deathlok program goes back to the early ‘90s, to an investor with a very, hm, personal interest. He’s not with us any longer, but the program goes on.”

“Hammer thought he could do better than me, too,” Tony said softly. “And Aldrich Killian.”

“Oh I _know_ ,” Quinn said, smiling at him. “And thank you, by the way, for taking them down for us. You’re pretty much our only rival now, you know that? You, personally, I mean,” he twirled his finger to indicate the Avengers as a whole. “Not so much you, Stark Industries. You, corporately, are behind the game. But I should thank you for taking out Killian and Hammer-- we were able to pick up a fair amount of technology on fire sale, so to speak.” 

Natasha looked down at her captor’s arm, again, at the inset insects. The topaz inserts seemed to pulse. Extremis? _Really?_ Had… they managed to replicate, to stabilize that? Or was she being held captive by a tinder box just waiting for a flame?

“You’re sick, Quinn,” Steve growled, and Quinn smirked at him and bounced a little in recognition. He was enjoying the hell out of this, clearly one of those men who lapped up superiority like milk. If she were only free, if she’d only known all this when she’d visited him on his yacht-- how easily she could have twisted him around her pinky.

Of course, she hadn’t know. It explained Clint’s sudden and precipitous exit from Quinn’s yacht, though. Clint had a bad habit of finding the sore spots in such men, and then digging in relentlessly. It wouldn’t have been the first time that habit had gotten him unceremoniously jettisoned from a moving vehicle. Not even the first time said moving vehicle had been over water.

Left temporarily unobserved while Quinn bantered with Steve, Tony turned pale-- well, more pale, and a little green, even-- and slumped for just a moment. 

“Even if you do take us out, SHIELD will never let you get away with this,” Steve told Quinn, holding his gaze. “The minute you start trying to sell to the Pentagon, they’ll be on it.”

“Oh, but my good Captain,” Quinn told him, “what makes you think SHIELD won’t be a buyer? Awful lot of Hydra cells still out there. Wouldn’t super soldiers be useful? And wouldn’t SHIELD want to be a buyer, to ensure we won’t be selling to their… rivals?”

“Nick Fury would never allow it,” Steve said, on a growl, and Tony growled with him. 

“Nick Fury and I have never talked,” Quinn said, dismissing him with a flick of the hand. 

“But you and Felix Blake have,” Natasha said, quietly, and they all turned to her. 

The realization had hit her with such sudden force that it had popped out of her mouth before she could stop it, not that she was sure she’d want to. Felix Blake, whose investigation of the disappearance of Dr. Hall had led him straight to Quinn. Blake, who’d been tasked with keeping the List safe. What else had he investigated, that might have found its way into hands that would misuse them? What the hell had his orders been, and had he been following them or not?

And was anything he’d told her since that morning real?

She felt sick. 

Quinn padded over to her, sleek as a panther. He slid one damp finger along the underside of her neck, pushing her chin up. As attempts to intimidate went, she’d suffered worse-- and skeevier-- but it didn’t prevent her from giving him a glare, just for form’s sake.

“Clever clever Widow,” he said. “Blake and I have talked. And so has Agent Ward, his pet dog. They interrupted some of my work. I interrupted theirs back.”

“You did more than that,” she said, forcing herself to look impressed, and he nodded.

“We came to an arrangement.”

She remembered Blake’s face, his gaze staring directly back at her through a sea of soldiers in the little control room. _Things might have been different_ , he’d said, if she’d been with him after he came back from the dead, instead of the team he’d been given.

“Ah. That explains why he disappeared on me.” Natasha made a pretense of looking around, as if just now noticing that Blake was gone. As if she thought she might have accidentally left him in the powder room after washing her hands. Quinn laughed at her confusion, and she heard rustling behind her from the other captives. In her mind, she begged Tony and Steve to just let her have her head. 

“Is it part of your arrangement that he gets to make free with your control room up there?” she asked, once she was sure she had Quinn’s full attention and was not going to be interrupted by the peanut gallery. “What do you think he’s doing? You… wouldn’t control anything besides this warehouse with it, would you? Not… the soldiers themselves or anything.”

It had been a wild guess, but it had hit with Hawkeye-esque accuracy.

For the first time, Quinn blanched. He darted a glance around him as if he, too, had only just noticed Blake was missing. She laughed at him, noting the twitch of his jaw as she did. _Sensitive little ferret. I’ve got your number now._

“Good try,” he told her, scowling. “But he’s the one who brought you here, for me. Why do you think you haven’t been able to raise each other on comms all this time, or talk to that quaint artificial intelligence of yours back at the Tower, Stark? Blake’s the one who figured out how to jam your frequencies. I don’t think I have anything to worry about.”

And then the smaller bay door behind them burst open, shivering the sides of the two-story steel slab it was set in with the force of the blow. Quinn spun to face it.

Unfortunately, that meant the arrow that took him down merely lodged in the meat of his shoulder, not in his chest. He howled and grabbed at it. 

The soldiers holding Captain America weren’t so lucky. In the split second it took them to register the threat, all three received arrows directly to the eyes. So did the two holding her.

Natasha went down with her soldiers in a tangle of limbs and came up in a crouch, watching for them to rise. 

They didn’t. They were breathing, certainly, but they didn’t bother to get up. 

_Blinded. God._

Was it her imagination, or did one of them even look a little… relieved?

“Suck it, Domitian!” called a voice from the rafters, jubilant and high.

 _Kate Bishop, my god_ Natasha thought, her breath caught. _You’re perfect._

She must be channeling Clint again. That sap.

“Hawkeye!” Tony was crying, even as Cap pulled the super soldier off him. Cap wrestled with the man half a moment before bringing him down, as Tony went running for the scrap heap of his armor.

Dimly, Natasha was aware of Victoria Hand pulling her to all the way to her feet, of Melinda May brushing past her in hot pursuit of Ian Quinn, who was headed for the back of the warehouse and the safety of the warren of offices underneath the superstructure. One hand was clamped hard over the arrow still sticking out of him.

There were more super soldiers pouring in past Quinn, more proof, if any were still needed, that Quinn had been waiting for the Avengers to come. Agent Triplett and Agent Amador were fighting them off with heavy caliber weaponry and the occasional flying fist. They bracketed Tony on either side. He’d fallen on his heap of discarded armor and was fiddling with something inside it and something on the bracelet on his wrist, alternately.

 _Phil! I'm going to kiss that man when this is over-- and Clint can just suck it up. He must have convinced them, somehow, that he wasn’t the traitor. But how the hell did they find out-- how did they-- where_ \--

Natasha pulled on Victoria’s sleeve as the woman started to leave.

“Where’s Coulson?” she hissed.

“Around,” Victoria told her. “He snuck ‘round back-- his job was to find Blake. Where--”

“Control room,” Natasha said, pointing up at the mirrored bay of windows that fronted it. “Last I saw. I don’t know what he was planning on-- _look out_!” 

She pushed Victoria down beneath herself, rolling them out of the way, as a metal shipping container fell through the roof, taking out corrugated roofing and iron rafters as it fell.

It landed on its doors, spidering the concrete with cracks, then creaked ominously once, twice, and flopped over on its side. It was empty inside, except for a jumble of what looked absurdly like lawn furniture.

“What the hell?” Tony cried-- or rather, Iron Man cried. He must have reassembled his suit while Natasha was distracted, because there he was, large as life, staring up at the rent the container had made, which was leaking blue sky. His repulsors were working, superheating the concrete under him, trying to blast off. The floor was scarring and cracking and his SHIELD guardians had fled the heat of it. But Iron Man wasn’t moving upward one inch.

“Hello,” said a voice from above, and Cap flung his newly-retrieved shield at it.

The shield hung, suspended, in an arc far above the warehouse floor, joined by four arrows and a smallish-sized hailstorm of bullets.

Slowly, something began to descend through that open hole. As it neared, it resolved itself into the form of a man, clad in black, silver bands crossing his waist and oversized plates like epaulettes balanced on his shoulders. It was a dramatic outfit, taken nearly over the top by the trio of red discs spangling the collars and the silver cape fluttering behind him. The man’s appearance might have been entirely operatic if only his face hadn’t been so half-finished. It was rounded and open, washed out mousy hair and light eyes behind wire-frame glasses-- and it was disturbingly familiar.

“Okay, I’m pretty sure we disintegrated you,” Tony said, glaring up at him. “Although I have to say, the cape is a nice addition.”

“I’m gravity itself, the very force that holds the universe together,” Dr. Franklin Hall replied. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.” 

“All right,” Tony admitted after a moment, and shut off his repulsors. “I guess not. Tell you what, we’ll put down the weapons, you’ll put down the gravity, and we’ll talk like civilized people?”

“Oh, no, God, no,” Dr. Hall said. “I’m so tired of talking. I’m so tired of _all_ of you, with the privatizing world peace nonsense. No, I don’t want to talk. Really, I just want to destroy you all. Hold still a moment, will you? This won’t hurt a bit.”  
Natasha didn’t want to obey, she really didn’t.

She just couldn’t move her arms.

\----

To be continued….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: this one’s for all the marbles.
> 
> I know, I know. I promise this was the LAST CLIFFHANGER, though. Next chapter is the big finale, and chapter 25 wraps things up. Meanwhile, if you haven't, drop by tumblr to read a [special bonus Bruce scene](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/111216590196/washed-ashore-mid-week-bonus-scene-has), cut from this chapter.
> 
> Posting-wise, we’re nearly there! We’ve only got a month to go. For the record, I started _writing_ this story in February of 2014, to start posting in late spring. I can’t believe it’s been a year. I can’t believe many of you have been reading this since last June. I love everyone reading these notes. Next chapter goes up on March 8.


	24. ... More Closely (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: The Avengers begin to understand the gravity of the situation, the cavalry arrives again and again, multiple people have very bad days, and there are compensations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Notes:  
> obligatory chicken note: All chickens were accidentally excised from this chapter.
> 
> Before you go in, a posting note: this is only half of this week's installment. Due to unexpected obligations on my front and [unexpected plumbing](http://faeleverte.tumblr.com/post/113139084434/and-the-plumbing-gods-are-fucking-with-me-again) on my beta’s, this installment will post in two parts. One tonight, and one either Monday or Tuesday night. Practically speaking, that means a double-dose of Washed Ashore and, well, you know what happens when I break chapters in half. We’re still on track for the final chapter on the 22nd.

**One**

 

They’d had very little time to celebrate and hardly more to plan their assault. Phil had begun discussing approaches, communications and weaponry with Melinda and Hand even before he’d fully pulled out of the stunned, half-hysterical hug he and Kate had fallen into after they’d gotten the messages Skye and JARVIS had sent from the Tower.

The ones saying that JARVIS had, at least provisionally, cleared Clint.

“Oh my God,” had been the extent of his verbal reaction, before he handed his phone over to Victoria Hand.

Kate had been far more eloquent.

“They did it,” she’d whispered, awed, into the collar of his suit jacket. “I may kill them all, but I think they actually did it.” Her heart had been beating far too fast, maybe with the same retroactive fear that had gripped his. 

But that was it. Dimly, beneath the surface, he’d registered knee-weakening relief at Skye’s message. It existed in a kind of incipient way, waiting to be felt at some future time, along with the surge of affection for Clint and Skye (and America and JARVIS and Sam and really pretty much the entire world) and some kind of indecipherable sinking feeling related to Felix. He had tamped them all down with as much ruthlessness as he could muster, forcing himself to remain in the high, cold, reactive place he’d been inhabiting the entire day. Ten minutes wasn’t nearly enough time for him to open himself back up to his emotions and deal with the resulting flood.

Not that anything short of a week would have been enough for Phil to begin to fully process the events of the last several hours.

So although Phil was currently at rest, crouching in the shadow of the catwalks beneath a tangle of cables and chains and a half-broken pulley that swung slowly back and forth above his head, his brain was still panting, running about half a block behind the course of events and yelling at it to wait up already.

But there was no waiting, not for anything. The pulley’s shadow slid over him again and again while he watched the closed door to the control room, a heavy metal thing in chipped cadet paint, set into a box of drywall. It might, Phil thought, be easier to go through the wall itself than the door. Assuming he could get past the big guy standing in front of it with the even bigger gun. The guy was wearing dusty blue coveralls, unlike the various soldiers holding the Avengers captive on the floor below. (Which Phil also wasn’t thinking about-- at the moment, they were the concern of Melinda and Hand and the other agents. His concern, his _only_ concern, had to be the door, and getting control of it so that they could destroy whatever was blocking the communications signal and let JARVIS through to Stark and Stark through to SHIELD.)

Phil gave himself one half moment to sigh, close his eyes, and remember Clint curled up in a sunbeam out on the dunes, himself standing out on the end of the dock staring out over the shining water. With his eyes still closed he wriggled a little, resettling the kevlar vest encasing his chest and loosening the tug of his rolled-up sleeves on his arms. 

He opened his eyes, then, and dove, coming up in a roll in front of the guard and dragging him down to the floor. 

It took him next to no time to dispatch the man, rendering him unconscious with no more regret than the idle thought that there was no way this guy had been a combatant. Phil started in on the door immediately, going for the lockpicks first. When those didn’t work he stepped back, contemplating the door itself. Too heavy to kick down, hinges on the inside so he couldn’t just pop them off-- it’d have to be an explosive. Unfortunately, he couldn’t trust Quinn to be _completely_ oblivious in the face of a boom of unknown source. He’d give away his position unless he covered it with a larger distraction from elsewhere.

Or.

Well.

Phil cocked his head, thought about his options once more, and figured _fuck it._

He knocked on the door.

 _Well it was worth a shot,_ Phil thought after he’d counted to ten-Mississippi without a response. He dropped a hand into his pocket to fish around for one of the little devices Triplett had given him before they left the jumpjet.

He’d just finished attaching one beneath the doorknob and was about to activate it, when the door swung open wide.

Felix Hollis-- Felix Blake, whoever-- was standing on the other side, smiling at Phil expectantly, his shark’s grin as wide and white as ever, and looking as self-satisfied as if he’d never betrayed Clint, nor gone into league with Ian Quinn, nor been Phil’s lover and left him believing Felix dead.

“You always were a smug asshole,” Phil greeted him.

At that moment, the world outside the control room rocked, SHIELD agents ran, arrows flew, and from somewhere away in the rafters Kate Bishop crowed out her victory.

\----

Phil cursed before he could stop himself, because what horrible fucking timing. Felix jumped, instinctively leaning out of the door to see what was going on. Phil saw his moment and took it, shouldering past him into the room trailing a subvocal stream of fucks, frigs, frickings, and the occasional crap.

“What are you--” Felix started, turning to stare at him, hand still on the door handle. Phil stared back, so hard it felt like his eyes were bugging out, because that was a _very fair_ sort of question. He’d had two objectives, the more important of which was de-jamming the communications frequencies, and if he completed his secondary objective (capture Blake) first he might lose the chance to achieve his primary goal. He needed _something_ to distract Felix for long enough for him to get a read on the situation.

It came to him in a flash, and it nearly made him laugh.

“Close the door,” he hissed. “Damnit, Felix. Unless you want them to spot us.”

Felix closed the door.

“Phil,” he started again, and then stopped, staring back at his hand like it had acted entirely on its own hook and he was considering a suitable punishment for the presumption.

“It’s Victoria Hand,” Phil cut him off. “And Melinda and Antoine Triplett and the rest. They’re after Ian Quinn. After-- well. Fuck. Let’s just say I’d hate to go up against her in a game of poker. She plays a nasty game.”

“She does?” 

Felix turned the lock and moved cautiously towards Phil, and towards the wall of windows overhanging the warehouse floor. He turned so he could look out, while still watching Phil’s reflection in the glass. Phil hunched himself down. The sounds of the fight filtered tinnily through the speakers, and Phil could see just a little of it from his angle.

“I didn’t suspect a thing, until she iced Agent Ward,” he said.

Felix choked, and Phil gave him a short smile-- one he hoped seemed sympathetic rather than satisfied. “Second time today, right? Poor kid. Had him convinced right up until the moment she did it. Then the claws came out. She gave me two minutes to convince me I was on her side. _Her_ side, Felix. Can you believe it?” 

“What…” Felix turned away from the glass, swallowing heavily and quirking his head at Phil, those china eyes of his steady. “What was her side?”

“Well she certainly didn’t contradict me when I asked if she’d betray Fury, and then she asked if I wanted to hear her offer. The other option, by implication, being the emergency door.”

“Huh,” Felix said, and looked down again, watching Hand carve her way cooly through the opposition a storey below them. “That I did not expect. I take it you didn’t choose the emergency door.”

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” Phil said, and decided it was time to test his boundaries. He moved a step closer to Felix, making a show of _not_ making a show about leaning over to check the fight in progress. “I take it you all found Ian Quinn after all. I didn’t expect the stand-off when I snuck in.”

Felix shook his head sadly, and ran his fingers idly over a couple of the controls. Phil deliberately looked away-- the glass reflected Felix’s hands anyway, watery and ghostlike.

“I swear Phil, it’s like they can’t help themselves,” he said. “The number of time over the years we got out of shit we shouldn’t have survived because some two-bit thug took the time to _tell_ us how he was gonna kill us instead of just putting a bullet between our eyes…” Felix broke off with a grunt, cursing at something he was seeing down on the warehouse floor.

“If you had a nickel you’d be rich?” Phil asked idly, moving one of his own hands out onto the control panel, just letting it brush. 

“I’d be something. No one understands.” It was half a mutter, as if Felix didn’t really mean to let it slip. 

_Yes, good, let your guard down. Doesn’t have to be much. I just need a split second._

“I hear that’s going around,” Phil said. “Being misunderstood. Was the plan to double-cross Quinn the entire time, or is all this by way of covering tracks?” He jerked his head out the glass as he said it, vaguely in the direction of Victoria Hand.

“Maybe both,” Felix said, following his glance, then adjusting a couple of levers and darting a glance over at a computer monitor, which was showing a schematic of the warehouse overlaid with a series of vectors and fields in green and blue. “Or maybe you’re not seeing the whole picture.”

“What’s the whole picture?” Phil asked, letting his hand rest along the edge of the control panel and leaning in, hoping he was coming off more Doc Halliday and less Wanda Jackson. _Just after the story, nothing more going on here. C’mon Felix, everyone wants to tell their story._

“This,” Felix said, and as he stepped away from the control panel he raised a little black gun, aiming it directly between Phil’s eyes. 

_Okay, he’s not_ that _smooth-- must have been under the counter,_ Phil had time to think, as he stepped backwards and raised his hands in the air.

“Now that’s disappointing,” he managed, keeping the half-smile on his face with an effort. Felix hadn’t dropped his, and Phil was damned if he was going to be the first to break. “I did hope we’d moved past that phase in our relationship.”

“I thought you’d be pleased that I don’t take you for granted, Phil,” Felix said sweetly. “Not bad, by the way-- either my memory’s slipping or you’ve gotten even better at that misdirection thing. Did she really think you wouldn’t choose the emergency door? Well-- Victoria’s not infallible, after all, and she doesn’t know you as well as I do.”

Phil briefly considered tackling him and risking the gun. What was the worst that could happen? He’d be lying on top of Felix wrestling for control while half bleeding out? He’d been in that position before. It held far fewer consolations now than it had at the time. 

“How do you think this is going to end, anyway, Felix?” Phil asked, trying to envision North Bar in his mind, his feet stepping in the soft sand in early morning, shells between his toes… anything to settle the fear currently strangling his voice, “do you honestly think you’re going to be able to go back to SHIELD after all this?” 

“SHIELD” Felix snorted. “Fury’d love it if I didn’t come back, wouldn’t he? I’m a mistake, to him. Loyal as a fucking dog, then sent off to the farm once I’d served my purpose, so he thought. And you came waltzing back in, the something better.” He sighed, and gave Phil a sympathetic once-over, smiling like it was Phil who wasn’t making sense. “Was that how he lured you in? Do a better job than Felix-- or was that just a bonus? I’d resent it if I hadn’t seen the bigger picture.”

“What is the bigger picture?” 

“Oh,” Felix said, easy and fond as he’d been in dusty desert mornings after his first cup of coffee, “just the key to the universe.”

And then a shipping container, painted an improbable shade of buttercup yellow, crashed through the roof outside the window. It smashed into the ground, bringing with it a load of assorted very _loud_ detritus.

Felix didn’t bother to turn; he just smiled.

“You know what I found, Phil?” he said. “When I started digging for answers? Trying to uncover what Fury had _done_ to me, why my brain itched like it was too big for my head anymore?” 

He leaned forward, and his eyes were wide and bright, boring straight into Phil’s with an intensity Phil didn’t think he’d _ever_ seen before.

“I found out that everyone who told me they _had_ answers was lying. Not intentionally, but because they were too small to see. They could only tell me in two dimensions, you understand. Babies who don’t even know there’s a deep language of the universe.” Felix jerked his thumb behind him out the window. “He comes close sometimes, but even _he_ \-- he’s only playing with atoms, you know. I’m playing with evolution itself.”

Which was the strangest way anyone had ever told Phil that they were out of his league.

It started out as a flutter of cape, and then Phil blinked, and shook his head, because what he was seeing was the back of a man, his cape billowing out behind him, descending slowly through mid-air.

“Okay, I’m pretty sure the Avengers disintegrated him,” Phil said. 

 

**Two**

 

“I may be slow,” Captain America said, staring upwards at Graviton, who was raising his hands in a manner Natasha could not, even given the gravit-- weigh-- er, _danger_ of the situation, take seriously, “but I don’t see what’s so wrong about world peace? It’s tops on _my_ letter to Santa, anyway.”

 _Oh my god, Steve, you little shit_ , Natasha thought, watching out of the corner of her eye as Captain America tried to pull his gee-whiz man-out-of-time con on a man currently floating in mid-air and holding them all captive with the power of gravity itself.

“Are you mad?” asked Graviton, crossing his arms and glaring down at Cap.

 _Yes_ , Natasha thought.

“Not at the moment, Doctor,” Cap said, reasonably. “Could get that way, though, depending on how this plays out. Are you objecting to world peace in general, or just us doing it?”

“There’s no such thing as ‘world peace,’ Captain Rogers,” Graviton told him. “Any more than perpetual motion or a free lunch. I know, I’ve had them all used on me. Most of them by Ian, down there.” 

Quinn, who’d been frozen halfway to safety, glared upwards, holding his wounded arm with one hand, arrow shaft still sticking out of it like an untrimmed twig in a shrubbery. 

“Didn’t you Ian?,” Graviton continued, his deceptively mild. “Tried to draw me in by promising me boundless opportunities for freedom, to work… to try and build a ‘better future,’” he spit out the last words, “for you, as it turned out.”

“I can understand crushing Quinn,” Natasha interjected, taking up Cap’s thread, and hoping against hope that he actually had a plan in mind, “but us?”

“You,” Graviton smiled, “you’re _obvious._ You Avengers, acting like you own the world, and your Mr. Stark, there.” He turned to Iron Man, cape billowing behind him as he moved, tangling around his knees at the turns. “‘Privatize world security.’ Face it, you’re just like Quinn under that damned plate of yours.”

“Now that’s a little unfair, don’t you think?” Iron Man asked, his face concealed by the armor but his tone light enough to be dangerous. “For one thing, I’m a lot less slimy than that guy, can we all just agree on that right now? For another, hello, not trying to make super soldiers here, because we all know that’s just a recipe for tears before bedtime-- no offense, Cap--”

“Eh,” Cap shrugged, looking over at him. 

“Well that was a resounding vote of confidence,” Iron Man continued. “But anyway we’re trying to _prevent_ the Hydras and Ian Quinns of the world, Doctor.”

“How? By becoming just like them? Oh you’re small now, all of you. Peanuts.” Graviton waved his hand, and Iron Man’s armor fell away from him, flaking like artichoke leaves. He kept going even once Tony was once again stripped to his nougaty center, pressing down until the suit smeared like anchovy paste on the concrete. Tony, to his eternal credit, managed to react with nothing more than a strangled shriek of outrage.

“Peanuts,” Graviton reiterated. “Even in its weakened state SHIELD has more reach than you do. But I know you, I saw Stark Industries grow, I know all about your inventions. You can’t help yourself, Stark. One of these days, you’ll do something even more stupid than he did.” Graviton pointed at Quinn, who’d spent his involuntary vacation from movement largely silent even when he was the topic of conversation. Now he rolled his eyes.

“I still don’t think--” Quinn said, speaking at last, and Natasha whipped her head towards him, hoping she could convey _shut the hell up and stay shut up_ with her eyes.

“You thought too much,” Graviton told him. “You thought you could control me. Now look at this mess. SHIELD should have let me take you down when I had the chance, before you could get this far in your perverse little schemes. But no, no, that would have been too easy for them, I see. They wanted the gravitonium, too, once they knew what it was.”

“I thought SHIELD didn’t find you,” Steve said, cautious now and dropping his bumpkin act, “after you were kidnapped.”

“Why Captain America, who told you that?” Graviton floated down a little, bobbing in place, the look on his face almost beguilingly worried. “Was it Director Fury? They found me-- or rather the blob of gravitonium containing me-- and they hid it away. Secret. Safe. Until, I am told, Hydra attacked.”

He bobbed up. 

“Or was it Agent Blake who told you? My… _rescuer_?”

\----

“Rescuer?” Phil asked, turning to Felix and raising both eyebrows. “What from?”

“From being, as he said, a mere blob of random sentience in a sea of gravitonium, buried at the bottom of the Fridge,” Felix Blake told him. 

Behind him, in the window, Graviton bobbed and wove his way through midair, while the occupants of the floor below him stood frozen at attention. 

“Granted, I’m the one who put him there in the first place, but he ought to be grateful for that, given everything. Look at him.” Felix waved his free hand wide.

Phil looked.

“Power to affect gravity itself,” Felix crooned. “Power to take anything he wants, to _do_ what he wants. He’s short sighted, of course, but he’s smart enough to agree with me on this. That the Avengers and Ian Quinn-- and SHIELD too-- all have to go.”

Phil crossed his arms and settled back on his heels-- it didn’t look like he was in _imminent_ danger of being shot.

“You’re not big on world peace either, then?” he asked.

This was not a shock-- Felix Hollis of old had been nothing if not cynical about the chance of anyone, ever, managing to end wars. Phil expected his last betrayal by Archstone had only served as the final nail in the coffin in any idea he might have had that world security should be properly trusted to private hands-- it had to Phil, anyway.

Which might, in retrospect, be some small part of why he’d clung so tenaciously to the Avengers, trying to keep them tied to SHIELD. To _some_ organization that, however horribly corrupted it had recently been, answered to other powers than itself.

_It may have been rotten with Hydra, but ‘protection’ is an honorable mission. And whatever his other faults, Marcus always stood by that one._

“World peace isn’t what I’m after, really. It’s world _transformation._ ” Felix leaned forward, and there was a wildness in his eyes that Phil had never seen from him, not in the middle of battle, or even bed. 

“I’ve seen the words of creation, Phil. They’re sliding around in my head, spilling out faster and faster every day. It would have been nice, symmetrical, to have the Avengers take Quinn out, now that I’ve gotten everything I needed from him. Sadly, they’d all fall in the process-- I’m sure the nation would mourn.”

“That leaves SHIELD,” Phil pointed out. He got a shrug in return.

“They wouldn’t long survive the disintegration of the Avengers-- or, if I needed another push, your betrayal. Fury certainly won’t survive that one, as head of anything.”

“And now Hall will kill the Avengers and you’ll kill me, and let others speculate.” The sick feeling in the pit of Phil’s stomach, surely that was for the plot itself and not the words spilling out of the man in front of him, the man that Fury and Clint had trusted. “How long have you been--” _like this_ , he couldn’t finish. _Deceiving them all,_ he didn’t say.

“Enlightened?” Felix asked, smiling almost coyly at him. “Rebirth has its benefits, though damn Fury for hiding them from me-- damn me for telling him to-- for so long.” He sighed, and it was almost sad. “Pity he didn’t let me contact Clint and Natasha. It would have been different. Having them with me. They would have helped when I needed it. Oh well,” he stood. “At least I have Grant. He, now, he was most useful. A son to me when I needed it.”

“But now you’ll let Hall kill Natasha? And maybe even Grant Ward? He’s still out there, tied up on the jump jet. Sure Hall won’t take him out too?” Phil asked him.

Felix paused a moment, lips pursing in thought, and then regret clouded his face.

“If I must. It would be unfortunate, but necessary. I have to get the chaff out of the way, before I can present myself as the only logical alternative.”

“My god,” Phil breathed, the sickness spread too far for him to stop it from boiling out of his mouth in words, “do you hear yourself? You’re monologuing like a villain, Holly.”

“It’s okay,” Felix told him, eyes so soft. “It’s okay, Phil. You won’t have to hear me much longer. Once they’re dead, once I’m sure, I’ll kill you too.”

It ought to have chilled Phil to the bone. And he _was_ chilled. He was _shivering_ , in fact. But it wasn’t only Felix causing the reaction. Phil tilted his chin up, pointing to the glass pane behind Felix.

“How does that fit into your master plan, Holly?” he asked.

Felix turned, to find Graviton hovering close to the glass now, staring in at them. The look on his face was equal parts rage and sorrow, nearly a mirror of Felix’s from a moment before.

“No,” Felix breathed. “No, we had a deal. He got them, and I got--”

“I hope you didn’t spit before shaking hands, Holly, because I don’t think he was bargaining in good faith,” Phil said.

As they watched, Graviton tipped his head to one side, and smiled.

“I didn’t forget about you, dear Agent,” he said to Felix. “And I do appreciate the way you made this moment possible.”

Felix lunged for the control panel. To do what, Phil wasn’t sure, but he never made it. Instead he went flying towards the back of the room-- as did Phil and all the furniture not bolted down. Phil hit the back wall, and the large pegboard of keys and tools hung on it, with a force that drove the breath out of him.

“Now where was I?” Graviton asked. “Oh yes. Destroying you all.”

The air behind him shattered.

 

**Three**

 

Hall-- or rather “Graviton” because apparently even with cosmic-level powers didn’t keep people from geeking out given the chance-- clearly _saw_ the blinding flash of blue light behind him. His eyes went round as his glasses frames, his mouth dropped into an o of surprise, and he had time to exclaim:

“Thor! Not even yo--” before it happened.

From her nest in the catwalk along the side wall of the warehouse, Kate had an unobstructed view of the event, though it still took her a long moment to process what she was seeing.

A hand, brown and strong, star shining at the wrist, reached through the boundaries of the portal. Those were beginning to crack like ice around a break, all dark water beneath. Graviton was already doing something with his hands, and anything not nailed down in the rafters zoomed towards the portal, ready to block it off. 

The junk might have gotten there in time, before that hand could do anything, except that Dr. Franklin Hall had decided to go with the cape option.

The hand was joined by an arm, then by America’s upper half, silhouetted against a backdrop of black and shadows with faint stars in the distance and at least two moons, one gibbous and one waning. Kate had half a moment to admire America’s beloved bitch face before her girlfriend grabbed at Graviton’s cape and tugged, hard, falling back as she did. 

Graviton came with her, the portal closing around them as he went through, so that his head disappeared with a visual sort of pop.

Immediately, gravity decided to reassert itself in its old-fashioned way, subtle as an apple to the head.

The pallets, steel plates, rods and chains Graviton had been throwing at the ex-portal continued on their path, fell straight through the empty space so recently occupied by another dimension, and crashed on the floor. 

Captain America’s shield dropped hard, hitting the concrete with a resonant twang then rolling on its rim in spirals ‘till it clattered to a halt and flopped over. The noise was almost lost against the rain of bullets and arrows hitting the ground. 

_Holy shit. Note to self, tell Billy to ditch the cape. Capes bad._ Kate thought, and then she thought again.

Or rather, she _didn’t_ think again, because her body was already telling her that _now_ was the time.

The people on the floor were still mostly frozen, a befuddled mass that had not yet sorted itself out into SHIELD agent and Avenger and super soldier, all of them still struggling to pick up the threads of their actions from where Hall had tossed them on the floor.

Kate, Kate already had a string in her hand, her arrow nocked to it. She was shooting before anyone could move, aiming for the super soldiers who clustered thick around the Black Widow.

It was only _one_ arrow, she could have sworn it was, but _two_ soldiers dropped with fletching in their eyes. 

A split second later, a third dropped, nearly in time with the sharp snap of a rifle. 

By then everyone was starting to move, and Kate tracked Ian Quinn, who had continued his interrupted course towards the exit, and was very _nearly_ there. She nocked another arrow and wheeled out of her hiding place to try and find a sightline. Leaning against the guardrail turned out to be a bad way to do so; she ended up half tipping herself off the cat in her zealousness to find a better angle. Kate managed to thrust a knee under the guardrail and yank herself back with a braced hip just before she tipped over. 

She’d lost her bead on Quinn while she was busy saving herself, but as it turned out it didn’t matter.

Another arrow’d already gone whistling after Quinn, the angle so steep it must have been shot from nearly directly above his head, somewhere in the tangle on the cats next to the superstructure. It missed Quinn-- had to, from that angle-- and Kate winced. 

Then something exploded in the depths beneath the superstructure, and Quinn was thrown backwards by a ripple of hot air. He skidded across the floor on his back, straight into a knot of his own soldiers, and took them all down like bowling pins.

“Hey, _Tony_ ,” the voice rang almost merrily from the rafters. “Ease up a little on the explosive shit in the next batch, huh?” 

“ _Barton?_ ” Stark asked, his voice cracking. He ran forward, clearly trying to blast off, having forgotten for the moment that his armor lay in goopy gobs at his feet. He jumped, once, searching futilely for the man belonging to the voice, before he had to turn and duck a soldier who was attempting to grab him.

 _Melodramatic much, Clint?_ Kate thought, and was nearly bowled over by the flare of fierce possessive fondness that welled up in her. Which she was never going to tell him about, even though she blamed _him_ for the distraction that led to a super soldier being right behind her when she turned. He was huge, or maybe he seemed that way because he was so damn close she could see the mole on the side of his neck, the wide pupils of his eyes and their thin brown irises, the cold, almost desperate, set to his jaw.

“Shit,” Kate said, her limbs gone all stiff on her at once, as if they thought her playing possum was going to somehow help the situation.

“Urk,” said the super soldier, and he fell with a bullet in his neck. Kate stared down at him, his eyes already going glassy, where the blood spiraling from the neat hole in his temple hadn’t washed them out entirely.

Kate could, perhaps, have wished that in the moment of realization, the _this is a dead body, this guy was just alive and breathing spearmint down my neck_ moment, that she’d had some kind of flash of the fragility of life, or maybe realized the enemy was just like her, or any number of high-minded mushy shit that meant she wasn’t a selfish brat.

She’d think about that _later_ ; just at the moment all she was thinking was that his eyes were the exact color of America’s, and that America had just pulled a supervillain into another dimension and-- as near as Kate could tell-- done it all by her ownself, so that there was no one to help her.

Kate stared down at a dead man and felt her heart break for her missing lover-- which was probably a sign she wasn’t ready for this superhero thing after all. She was pretty sure she was supposed to be feeling more for _him._

The footstep behind her was her only warning before an arm wrapped itself like a vice around her waist, and voice whispered in her ear.

“Hey, chica.”

“America,” Kate sobbed, and turned around to bury herself in a cloud of black curls.

“Shhh, Kate,” America whispered, holding her tightly. “You’re safe, you’re _safe._ You’re safe.”

It was absurd, Kate should have been telling America that, perhaps she even was, the way she was clutching so tightly to America’s jacket, trying to pull America right into her ribcage and keep her there.

“Hey,” America said again after a moment.

“Hey,” Kate replied, and she forced her limbs to obey her and unlock. She was a Hawkeye after all, and they still had work to do. “Sorry. I just-- I wasn’t sure you were gonna--” she trailed off.

“Aw, princess,” America leaned forward to brush their noses together. “Takes more than one crazy who can control gravity to take me down. He was too busy trying to fend off a giant sloth to notice when I popped out.”

Ian Quinn had pulled himself out of the tangle of limbs he’d fallen into, and was back on his beeline for the safety of the back offices, closely followed by the Black Widow.

 _She_ was being followed by a super soldier with a metal plate covering half his torso, who also appeared to be able to shoot bullets from some kind of implant in his arm and that was _not cool at all_. Not even one bit.

From the far cat, a shaggy-haired man in black leather set down his sniper rifle, stepped up on the rail, and then stepped back _off_ , falling heavily on to a pallet of boxes. It crushed beneath him, scattering glass vials, circuitry, and packing peanuts everywhere. He road the avalanche down and grabbed at the soldier with the semi-automatic arms as he passed, wrapping an elbow around the man’s neck and taking him down. Like the soldier he was choking out, the man had a metal arm.

Captain America turned to watch him rise, and greeted him with a high, spiraling “Bucky? What the hell?”

America stepped back to give Kate free reign in this, her chosen perch, which gave her room to rain arrows on nearly the entire sweep of the floor, and kissed her cheek.

“See you in a minute,” she said, and swooped off into the fight herself.

 

**Four**

 

One moment, Phil had been pressed to the back wall, his head squashed back against the pegboard with hooks poking into the back of his neck and keys slithering down his collar, and an empty metal filing cabinet smashed against his legs. The next, the cabinet had dropped to the floor and he’d slumped over it, surrounded by a little halo of keys and tags. 

"Urngh," Felix said, from his right, and Phil heard more than saw him leaping for his gun and then scrambling to his feet.

""Totally in control,'" Phil quoted, starting to heave himself up from the cabinet. 

"Hall was short-sighted; it's no real loss. You don't need to move on my account," Felix said casually, and he began to come closer, already flipping the safety off. "I can take care of you right-- freeze!" 

Phil froze, before realizing that Felix wasn't talking to him. 

"I'm sorry," said a voice, it’s owner obscured by Felix, who had turned to meet the threat, gun trained on the interloper. "I'm just here to do a thing with the computer. Won't bug you at all." 

_Skye_ , Phil thought, and fought down the wave of relief that was threatening to break in his eyes. He concentrated on backing himself into an upright position as quietly as he could.

"Come in and sit down," Felix told her, his voice calm and even. "Somewhere I can see your hands. You must be Skye. Agent Ward had a lot to say about you."

"And you must be Felix Blake. I thought you'd be, y'know, taller." She sidled into the room, her hands up in the air in front, and drifted towards the wall holding the control panel. Much as Phil appreciated seeing her here and whole-- and evidently unharmed by her encounter with Ward in the bunker on North Bar-- seeing her on the other end of a loaded weapon was giving him fits.

"Back away _now_ or I shoot,” Felix snapped at her. “No, no, not there. Over here, Skye. I'm not letting you anywhere near a control panel."

Phil’s feet were trapped beneath the cabinet, which was being stubborn. It had caught on either a hump of carpet or some other low obstacle to progress that Phil couldn’t clearly see. He slumped down against the wall and looked around the side, trying to find the impediment. 

It meant he gave up his view of Felix and Skye. All he could see in front of him was the expanse of dingy purple carpet and various dented metal front cabinets. If he looked right, his view was uninterrupted all the way to the second door to the control room and past it onto the darkened cats. 

Well-- it was a view uninterrupted except by a pair of black rubber pull up boots with bright orange toes, from which somewhat damp and soot-smudged jeans emerged. 

_Oh._ Phil thought, blinking at those boots and trying to stop the sudden grin that was threatening to overtake his face.

"Over here?" Skye was saying, only to be stopped again by a jerk from Felix’s gun. Phil looked up-- at her, definitely _not_ at the other door-- to find her backstepping, attempting to flank Felix and get to the center of the room.

"So you can back out the door? I'm disappointed, I thought you were smarter than that.” Felix’s attention was mostly focused on her; he must have seen that Phil was trapped and decided he had a few moments of freedom. He waggled the gun at Skye, pointing to her right. “No, over there by the wall, where I can see you and you can't meddle with the controls."

"Oh it's too late for that," Skye said gaily. "Phil planted the bug already. I’m in-- phone's all I need. See?"

"Give me that," Felix snapped, reaching out for the phone she was waving. 

The boots and their owner had advanced to Phil’s location now, and abruptly turned into a pair of bent knees and bare forearms, all straining and lifting. Phil felt his crushed toes uncurl and relax as the cabinet was levered off of them. He helped slide it to the side and swung his legs free of it as quickly as he dared then put his finger to his lips, looking up into a set of clear, serious eyes. 

_No sound now._

Fingers brushed his, once, bringing his hand down from his face. He caught their tips with his, just long enough to be the ghost of a caress, then turned his attention back to Felix. He felt more than heard his rescuer retreat a step.

"This is not-- What the hell is this?" Felix said, staring at the display on Skye’s phone. Skye beamed, spreading her arms so wide she looked like she had plaid flannel wings.

"A distraction," she said. "Look behind you."

"Hi, Felix" Clint said, in a voice that sounded like he'd recently swallowed a metal rasp, "long time no see."

Confounded was a good look on Felix, Phil had to admit. On him, slack-jawed and gaping like a he’d been slapped by a large cod was actually quite attractive. It was also uncomfortably familiar-- _oh God, that’s his O-face too. Was._ Was _his… damnit, no._

Felix had gone so numb that Skye’s phone was hanging from his hands in imminent danger of falling to the ground. He looked-- well honestly, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. 

And it served him _absolutely right_. It also definitively answered the question of whether or not Felix had suspected Clint was alive.

“You--” Felix started, then he made an odd little ticking sound and snapped his mouth shut. Whatever he was seeing was evidently making him think twice. Phil glanced over his shoulder, and his own lips parted a little.

Oh. So _that_ was what Hawkeye looked like up close and intimate.

Apart from the wicked black curve of the bow he was holding, nearly art nouveau in its lines, and the triple-pronged arrow nocked to its string, Clint wasn’t wearing anything that would be recognizable as belonging to the Avenging Archer. No, he was stretching the seams of one of the unintentionally phallic souvenir shirts that had been all over the island one summer several years back, and saran wrap-covered gauze swathed one forearm. He’d clearly come fairly straight from his firefighting duties, having ditched his turnout but retained his big rubber boots. Beyond that, he’d slung a sleek black quiver at his hip. 

It _should_ have been impossible to take him seriously. Behind his leonine shag of hair and beard, however, Clint’s face had set, concentrated and dangerous in a way that made _Phil’s_ skin prickle, and he wasn’t on the receiving end of that glare. It was pure Avenger.

“Yeah, me,” Clint said, his voice at odds with the look on his face. “Cat came back. And I’m a little pissed, Felix. You set me up.”

“I didn’t mean,” Felix was backing up, clearly spooked, and Skye shifted behind him to get between him and the door. “I never meant--”

“Not really interested right now,” Clint cut him off, stepping up to Phil’s side. Phil knew he ought to be watching Felix, but he couldn’t resist another glance over, because having Hawkeye at his side was dangerously captivating. “We can go into that back at the Tower. Right now, I want you to step back, away from Skye and Phil, drop the gun, and sit down. We’ll keep you nice and safe while we clean up your mess.” 

“‘Skye and Phil,’” Felix repeated, looking between Clint and Phil again. Phil tried to keep a straight face, he _really_ did. But the muscles that made it up had been so overused already that it slipped, and something of the proprietary satisfaction he felt any time he was near Clint must have shown through. 

“You were asking me why I went to Fury, Felix?” Phil said, more gently than he’d intended. Felix closed his eyes, just for half a moment, and shook his head. His broad lips twisted for a moment with some unnamable emotion, then cleared.

“Naturally,” Felix he said at last. “I suppose I should have expected that.”

 _No, Felix, I did not roll over and die. And_ I _know how to value him at his worth._

“Skye, please do the honors; we’re running out of time,” Phil said instead, and Skye gave him a quick salute.

“Yes sir, boss,” she said, and added “good to see you, too.” 

As Skye bent down to rustle in an unharmed cabinet next to the doorway, looking for something suitable to use for human bondage, Clint cursed. Phil looked up to see a movement in the catwalks just beyond her.

Clint shifted his aim and let his arrow fly within the split of a second. It sped past Felix’s left ear and directly through the point in space that Skye’s head had until recently occupied. When it hit the something looming in the darkness, it did so with an ominously meaty thwunk.

The recipient of the arrow screamed and began to convulse, blue light crawling over his body. 

Unfortunately he fell _into_ the room, and on top of Skye. 

As he toppled, Phil recognized Agent Grant Ward, and had a brief moment of disbelief. Agent Triplett had left him securely confined to the jumpjet’s cargo hold, and they’d taken everyone else on the plane with them for the assault. At the time, he’d still been unconscious.

_How the hell does that asshole keep on coming back?_

Skye screamed and kicked, struggling to push Ward off of her as his limbs jerked helplessly.

Felix took advantage of the brief moment of confusion to grab his gun off the cabinet and aim it at Clint, who was re-nocking his bow.

Phil didn’t have to think-- even after fifteen years his body still reacted on instinct when someone was aiming a gun at one of his people. He was crashing into Clint before Felix could even pull the trigger, and the shot went over both their heads and buried itself in the safety glass. Clint and Phil went down together in a tangle of limbs and bow.

A sleek black shoe hit the carpet just in Phil’s line of vision, and bounded up again. The air shifted above him as Felix leapt, and Phil rolled to his feet just in time to see him disappear out the door.

“Help Skye,” he grunted to Clint, and followed.

\----

He caught up to Felix a very little distance outside the control room, in the darkness of the catwalk. Phil didn’t stop to judge his ground, he was entirely focused on Felix. He flung himself forward, sending them both crashing into the nearest guardrail. 

Phil grabbed Felix’s wrist with one hand and banged it hard against one of the metal supports, trying to jar the gun out of his fingers. Felix snarled in his face, his breath hot on Phil’s cheeks, and bucked with his hips, trying to throw Phil off him. It worked to an extent; gave Felix just enough room to wriggle his way off the railing, before Phil dragged him back.

They wrestled for control of the gun without dignity, Phil kneeing upwards when Felix accidentally gave him the opening, then pressing forward, feeling his thigh and hip slide up tight between Felix’s legs. Felix yanked him backwards by his hair at another point. Phil fought to keep his hand tight around the strong knobs of Felix’s wrist, applying every ounce of strength to forcing the gun down and away from any dangerous vector. 

Their breath came in pants, eyes wide and black in the dark. They were both frantic, desperate. A wave of revulsion rose in Phil, along with something else, something that reminded him how familiar it had all once been. He dug in, grabbing onto Felix’s wrists with both hands now, and Felix yanked away from him.

His back was to the railing, and he was pulling with his shoulders, Phil coming forward with him. Felix’s hip hooked on the rail and he overbalanced, falling backwards, headfirst, and taking Phil with him.

Phil tipped downwards, blood rushing to his nose and cheeks, and his entire body went weightless-- a cruel lie-- for a moment, before he’d let go of Felix’s wrists and was scrambling upwards, looking for purchase.

He found it-- one hand managing to grab at an iron bar on the bottom of the catwalk and tighten, even though his arm screamed at the abuse. He hung a moment, fingers creaking, heart pounding, head light, and Felix hung next to him. His legs dangled over empty space.

 

**Five**

 

Natasha would be the first to admit she hadn’t been paying enough attention; she’d been a little busy fighting multiple super soldiers as soon as Hall had disappeared into the oh-so-convenient blue. Her Widow’s Bites were useless against half of them, and nearly out of charge as well. Despite Quinn’s super soldier assembly line sales pitch, each of these soldiers was still more-or-less custom built from a common stock-- a series of beta tests or early production runs, as Quinn might have put it. Most of them fought dead-eyed and blank, or in a kind of nightmarish half-aware haze. When they went down, they got up again. And again. And again.

So, somewhere in the middle of the rough-and-tumble and the kicking of soft bits and use of her garrotte, knives, and gun, Natasha missed when the second archer joined Kate Bishop.

She _did_ look up at the explosion under the superstructure, the one that blew Quinn backwards, skidding across the concrete floor on his ass. That was when she registered the extra shadow moving along the catwalks next to the control room. A shadow with a bow, a shadow giving Tony Stark _testing notes_ in the middle of battle.

“Barton?” Tony cried, voice breaking, and Natasha fought down a wild laugh that was trying to claw its way out of her throat.

_Got it right at last._

Natasha could already tell Clint had disappeared again-- and she entirely failed to be shocked. Phil was most likely in the control room. Of course he’d head there first.

At the moment, Natasha had her own battles to fight-- Quinn was still in reach, not gone yet, only just wobbling to his feet. His tumble had finally broken off most of the shaft of the arrow stuck in him. She set out after him, crouching forward to give herself more speed, and was nearly within clutching distance of his collar when the first bullet whizzed past her.

She turned, to find a soldier following her. This man was taller than the rest, his suit dark and covered in gauntlets and straps. He sported the gun-bracers of several of the other soldiers and a thicker breastplate, segmented like a millipede’s torso. His spine, when he turned, was ridged as well. He fought with cold efficiency, and locked on her like he had a heat-seaking system onboard. 

_Oh, hell_ she thought.

 _He_ could be trouble. His gaze was so cold it looked like it froze him as well, and for the first time-- well, nearly the first time-- Natasha knew what people had seen when they looked in the eyes of the Black Widow in her youth.

And then the soldier disappeared in a pile of pallets and the metal arm of James “Bucky” Barnes. 

Natasha felt her heart stop for a moment, as James dropped the man and looked up at her. He was still alive, the soldier in the dark armor; James swept his fingers almost casually over the man’s neck as he stood, pads hovering at pulse points. If he was half as hardy as the rest of his brethren (and there were no sistren-- which really just seemed typical of Quinn and his ilk), he’d be awake again before long.

Why was she relieved?

As for James, seeing him was not particularly reassuring. She’d seen the Winter Soldier in battle before, of course. Up close and _very_ personal. Hell, she’d been _shot_ by the Winter Soldier before. While the Black Widow feared very little she had a more than healthy respect for her own life, and that had always involved staying the hell away from the Winter Soldier on a mission.

The man she was seeing in front of her now looked more than half Winter Soldier.

It was the first time she’d seen _him_ since the day the Triskelion fell.

Natasha hadn’t been there when James Barnes had turned up one day at a Hydra facility that Steve and Sam had been in the process of blowing up. Or rather, he’d turned up at the _remains_ of the Hydra facility, since he’d kind of pre-destroyed it for them.

When he’d come in with them, he’d been quiet, scruffy, underfed, and exhausted, the polar opposite of the implacable killer who’d leapt from a bridge and still haunted her nightmares. Under Sam and Steve’s care he’d grown sleek, filled out, trimmed his hair a little, and his eyes had brightened. She’d learned to differentiate James from the Winter Soldier, to listen to his voice as it slowly grew in confidence. She’d noticed the restlessness in him, and by then been his friend enough to use it to her advantage.

Natasha _liked_ James. 

She wasn’t sure what to make of the Winter Soldier, saving her, and was almost afraid to look into his eyes, lest she find them as icy as those of the man he’d just choked out. _Do any of us ever truly thaw?_

When she did raise her gaze, she found warm blue eyes looking back at her, vaguely worried. He might _look_ like the Winter Soldier-- but he winked like Bucky Barnes.

Something cracked a little inside her, went disturbingly mooshy. (Not that she’d ever have admitted that to anyone except Clint. And only maybe then, under duress and the influence.) 

_That’s the style_ she thought, and gave him a quick flash of a smile, before turning in pursuit of Quinn, who’d finally managed to disappear. 

_This is the price I pay for being distracted by stupid ex-Russian assassins and their stupid winks._ She scanned the room impatiently, electrocuting a soldier when he got too close to her while fighting Antoine Triplett.

Behind her, Captain America had spotted James, and yelled his name with a sort of half-choked incredulity that frankly boded no one any good, once the battle was over.

“Never mind Bucky-- didn’t you see Barton?” Tony yelled, and she turned to find him tugging on Cap’s arm, pointing to the catwalks.

“Where?” Cap asked, looking around wildly. _His_ voice cracked just like Tony’s had earlier, because apparently this was return-of-puberty day among the Avengers set. Finally, he dropped his shoulders and shook his head. “Tony, not again. Please. You have to stop seeing Clint around every corner-- that wasn’t him.”

 _Well, I’m not going to find Quinn anytime soon,_ she sighed to herself, and started to walk over. Before she could get to Cap, however, James did, and he did a very strange thing.

He _laughed_.

“Hell yeah, it was Barton,” he said. Natasha’s heart flipped over in her chest at the satisfaction in his voice.

Hell yes it was Barton.

“But-- Bucky, how? And-- why? Did you find him? Did he find you-- how the hell did you _get_ here?” Cap had turned right back into Steve in his shock. He’d also lost every vestige of his protective sass, a vulnerability that she’d only ever seen him deploy around James. Of all the Avengers, Natasha’d actually worried most about how Steve would take Clint’s return if (when) it happened. He had been torn in so many directions by it, that she had been afraid that loosening the tension would cause its own damage.

“Oh the usual way,” James said breezily, as if he hadn’t noticed that Steve was starting to go google-eyed, “transdimensional portal. You all weren’t answering your phones so he thought he’d pop in and see what was up. I came along for the fun and to keep your sorry ass out of trouble, Cap.”

Steve was staring at him, looking more like a red white and blue bug than ever with his eyes gone so wide in his helmet.

“You trust him?” Tony asked James, shouldering back into the conversation. Even as he asked, he was adjusting the strap of a semi-automatic around his shoulder. He’d also picked up a gauntlet from one of the super soldiers who’d finally gone down enough times to _stay_ down-- Natasha was beginning to think that roaches were the more appropriate analog for Quinn’s super soldiers than centipedes-- and he picked at the wiring on it idly.

_When he’s done, it’ll probably be able to take out half of Manhattan._

That was when the shoe fell on her head, and she looked up.

Hanging from the catwalk far above her were two men, both of them swinging helplessly, one kicking the other in between attempts to pull up onto the cat. That was where the lost shoe came in, apparently. Both of them were in suit pants and kevlar vests, which meant, really--

“ _Up! Someone look up!_ ” she cried, and spun around.

“I’ve got it--” James said, already backing away with a manic grin on his face. Just what he was planning Natasha never did know, because at that moment he was broadsided by a forklift. 

\----  
To be continued....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End Notes:
> 
> Next time: catwalks, forklifts, reunions and resolutions
> 
> Okay. Okay. I remember what I promised last time. Before you say it, technically that was NOT a cliffhanger.
> 
> It was a catwalk-hanger.
> 
> Shut up about the forklift.
> 
> I _swear_ the full chapter end, coming in only a few days, is not a cliffhanger. We really will get it up soon, but this is not a chapter that can go un-beta'd. If it were a matter of typos I'd say fuck it, but Fae's main task is keeping me from writing myself into knots, and you may have noticed the number of parts moving in this chapter.
> 
> Meanwhile, tonight's [tumblr bonus](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/113140894721/washed-ashore-chapter-24-bonus-dont-kill-me-scene) is a deleted scene from the jumpjet, taking place between Chapter 23 and Chapter 24. Includes the full version of the Phil-Kate hug.
> 
> Also, if anybody has tips and tricks for ending really absurd runs of bad luck, or any pictures of cute bunnies (or cute Winter Soldiers), you could do worse than to send 'em to [Faeleverte.](http://faeleverte.tumblr.com/) She's skipped past "misadventure" stage into "curse," I think.


	25. ... More Closely (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rescues of all sorts, to varying degrees of success and timeliness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: the chicken is _still_ not a shapeshifter.
> 
> Here you go, my pretties! No cliffhangers here, to speak of.

**One**

Clint watched Phil disappear out the door into the shadows, steel girders, and dust, and willed himself to start breathing again. Even bruised, with dried blood dark on his lip and forehead and scratches up his bared forearms, Phil was entirely feline at that moment, all panther-black in suit pants and kevlar, fluid movements and curved smile. Where the hell had Clint’s scruffy twinkly folksinger gone, the one who fed chickens and bandaged Hawkeyes?

“Ow! Offame!” Skye grunted, and Clint spun. She was still trapped by the half-aware, twitching Agent Ward, and was growing less and less pleased by the instant.

_Right._

Freeing Skye was simple enough; Clint was able to yank the shock arrow out of Ward’s shoulder, drag him off Skye, and shove him out the door all in one smooth motion. He fell like a ragdoll when dropped, a heap of limbs.

Skye was already been on her feet when Clint turned back from locking the door, rubbing one shoulder absently. Her grin was nearly disturbingly Phil-like; Clint only hoped she wasn’t imprinting so thoroughly she’d have trouble when it came time for her to fly away.

“The amount of shocks that guy’s getting today, do we need to worry he’s getting immune?” she asked.

Clint snorted, then looked back at the door. _I suppose if anyone could, it’d be Jawbones. Well. Door’ll keep him out long enough to warn us, if he manages to scrape himself up off the cats anytime before spring. Have to get Stark to calibrate the shock better. Might be it. Then again-- who knows what kind of resistance training SHIELD was giving out after I left?_

The thought, coming with the clarity of hindsight and Hydra, sat uncomfortably with him. Ward had been Garrett’s protege, after all. Garrett had… not been the man they all thought he’d been. 

_Garrett died years ago. Our lives are nearly unrecognizable now, compared to what they were then. Ward’s too, I assume._

“You still got the comms?” he asked Skye, only half watching her while he examined his arrow, then replaced it in the quiver. 

“Please,” Skye said, backing out from under the control panel, “I wasn’t lying at all when I said I was already in. Phil came through in spades-- and Triplett. I wouldn’t have expected SHIELD to have one of these on hand that we could use.” She tapped a small black nubbin that she’d stuck to the panel, camouflaged next to several buttons native to the hardware. “So there’s JARVIS, already inside and hunting through the system. Well, part of him. His eyes and ears basically-- transmitting back to his brains on my phone.” 

“Yeah?” Clint came up to look over her shoulder, giving her one more covert glance as he did. Skye held the phone up for him to see; a fast-moving ticker of code that he didn’t even try to decipher. He nodded in what he hoped was a reassuring fashion.

“Yeah,” she said.

Her hands were steady as she worked, her gaze as focused as Tasha the hen’s ever was. He wished Phil was there to see their girl go. She caught him watching, and wrinkled her nose at him.

“Hey, Clint, nothing more you can do in here. Just let me and mini JARVIS work. We’ll get communications open so big JARVIS can talk to Stark and make sure he and Rogers have got the dirt on you before they do something stupid. Then JARVIS and I are gonna see what _else_ is being controlled from here-- we’ve got a funky feeling.”

“Do you need me?” Clint asked her, more for form’s sake than anything else. She was already getting lost in the code. 

Sure enough, Skye shook her head distractedly, and waved a hand over her shoulder at him.

“I’m good to go here. Could use someone to buy me time. Go rescue your man.”

“Not worried about Phil; he can take care of himself,” Clint told her, ignoring the voice in the back of his head screaming at him that Phil was going to get himself _hurt_ out there and what the hell was Clint doing _not being out there already goddamnit_.

He reached around and gave Skye a hug before heading for the door. She patted his hand with hers absently enough that he wondered if she’d mistaken him for Lucky-- or a chicken. She’d already forgotten him and was humming happily to herself while poking at her phone with one hand, and tapping at a computer terminal with the other. 

_Glad at least one of us is having fun_ , he thought, and then blushed and fought down the instinctive urge to apologize to his bow. It was a hell of a first date for the new weapon; they were either going to end up married by the time the day was done, or they’d never speak to each other again. Right now, she was doing her best to entice him with her light body and easy curves. 

Clint slipped out the door with his bow in hand and an arrow held loosely, ready to nock, looking for signs of a fight-- or, as likely as not, an unconscious man in half a suit and some kevlar, perhaps being hovered over by a not-unconscious man in half a different suit.

Reality proved very disappointing in both regards: the catwalks were dark and empty. Between the dilation in his pupils as he stepped into the dim lighting and the booms and yelps echoing across the warehouse and bouncing back he was thoroughly disoriented for a moment. Where the hell could they have gotten to?

 _Maybe Felix made the stairs, or the ladder, and Phil went after him._

Clint shook his head and squinted through the gloom, trying to call the layout to mind and moving forward slowly as he would in turbid water, trying to avoid sudden drops. It had seemed pretty simple, really, when Skye and mini-JARV had explained it to them, while they were sitting on the roof of the warehouse. 

America had jumped them to the roof first to scout; that was what had saved them all. Graviton had concentrated all his attention on the interior of the warehouse so Bucky and Clint were able to form a plan of action while Skye and the mini-JARVIS on her phone complimented the fragmentary plans that had been on Quinn’s servers with the scans of the interior that Skye took for him. The little guy might be a moron compared to the full-strength version of JARVIS waiting impatiently back home for Skye to open communications again, but he was still good enough that Skye, Bucky, and Clint had all been able to find separate methods of ingress that kept them out of Hall’s influence. America had carefully judged her jump, the one that was going to take her out of one dimension and into another, then back out just behind Hall.

Now, Clint was realizing he hadn’t paid enough attention to what would happen once he’d gotten to the control room-- he needed to find the access to the lower levels, pronto. There were open-backed, rickety-looking stairs along the far wall, several turns away. Too far, and anyway he could see everything on them-- a sight that did _not_ include any Agents of SHIELD.

Well, not the right ones-- Agent May had gotten herself up there and was singlehandedly tossing super soldiers over the railing to land on the heads of the combatants on the floor below. If Phil or Felix had come her way, there was no sign of it.

 _Has to be some way down; a collapsible ladder maybe._ There were no breaks in the rail so far as he could see, but it was hip- height--anyone could duck under it at any point. Maybe the ladder was just attached to the bottom of the catwalk.

Clint crouched and poked his head out from the railing, staring off towards the far wall. Nada. 

"Clint?"

The voice was faint, strangled. Clint was just turning when a bullet pinged off the metal next to his ear. He turtled quickly back into the shadows. After a long, tense moment when no second shot followed, he concluded it had been a stray and looked around. Still nothing that direction.

He'd heard his name, though, he was sure. It had even sounded like Phil. (That happened often enough in dreams and in lonely moments on the dunes or in bed in the still of night that he couldn't necessarily assume it was real.)

"Clint!"

Clint looked behind him at the expanse of empty catwalk. 

_What the?_

There was something scrambling, not a meter ahead, on the floor of the catwalk, drawn and then withdrawn, its motion crablike. The thing itself was too pale and fleshy to be a crustacean-- in fact, it looked a hell of a lot like a person’s hand. 

A hand desperately clawing for purchase, before disappearing below the level of the cat again.

_Shit!_

“Phil!” 

Clint threw his bow aside without compunction and flopped down stomach-first on the catwalk. He did his best to ignore the latticed iron grating into his abdomen as he army-crawled to the side and looked over the edge.

“Help?” said Phil, looking up at him with wide dark eyes in a chalky face.

He was dangling, mostly by one hand, off the understructure of the catwalk, his knuckles as white as his face. Every time he tried to pull his other hand up to take off the weight, Felix Blake batted it away.

 _He_ was hanging right next to Phil, alternately attempting to pull himself up and pull Phil _down_ , clearly not having gotten the message that falling off of high places was an automatic time-out in any tussle. 

This, in Clint’s book, was a sin right up there with not cleaning your weapon after use, putting an empty jar of peanut butter in the fridge, and pointing out a no-hitter while in progress. No-one past their first dangle ought to forget it. Cardinal rule. 

It was hardly the first time he’d found Felix Blake in such a precarious position, so the man ought to have known. The last time he’d spotted Blake swinging from a highly unstable structure he hadn’t been attempting to push someone else off it in direct contravention of the laws of nature and of nations. Though that might have been because of the pirahnas. 

Far below them the soldiers and the SHIELD agents battled back and forth, occasionally sending stray bullets or shields or bodies sailing into the air. In the midst of the battle, Natasha was a slim red-haired beacon, pointing upwards, while behind her Bucky Barnes had grabbed onto the tines of a forklift like a bull leaper, and seemed to be about to toss himself into the air. He couldn’t imagine what either of them could do in time to help-- it was gonna have to be Clint.

Clint’s first instinct, honed over decades of missions, and the memory of overly toothy fish, was to reach for Blake with his left hand. He’d already grabbed at Phil’s wrist with his right, tightening hard enough to feel the knobs of his wristbones dig into the palm.

He pulled back at the last moment. 

Blake was in too fey a mood. There was no telling whether he’d accept the help, or use the opportunity to try and pull Clint _and_ Phil down. Clint could have risked it for himself-- hell, he’d have won that fight easy, anyway, but there was no way he was risking Phil’s life that way. 

Blake’d just have to wait until Clint had his partner back topside and ready to help him.

He slapped his left hand around his right and heaved Phil upwards. Phil finally got a grip on the deck’s latticework with his free hand and pulled. After a moment, Clint was able to drop his hand and grab at his belt, hauling his ass after the rest of him. Phil flopped on top of him, panting into his neck, legs and thighs tangled in his, with one of Clint’s hands still tangled in his belt and the other tucked up underneath his kevlar. They gulped in unison. 

“Holly,” Phil groaned after a moment. “Still down there.”

Clint went limp, untangling his hands and letting his legs drop open. Phil rolled off him and turned on his hands and knees, shifting to peer over the rail. After a long moment in which Clint closed his eyes and reminded himself that he’d regret it if he didn’t, he turned over and joined Phil.

No good was going to come of ever telling Phil _not_ to try and rescue a person, he knew. So when Phil put his hand down through the railing and held it out to Felix, telling him to grab on, Clint merely put his hands on Phil’s knees and braced. He just hoped it would be enough to prevent Phil from going over the edge again if Blake decided to take someone with him instead of coming up.

Except that Blake apparently didn’t like either option.

“No!” he snarled. His face was red with the effort of holding himself up, his legs swang below him like he was practicing to be the pendulum of a bell, and he was clearly not in a mood to be helped by anybody, least of all his ex-lover and his former teammate. “Not giving you… the satisfact’n, Phil. Rather take my chances….”

In lieu of finishing the sentence, he let go of the catwalk.

Phil yelled, reaching forward desperately, and Clint lunged too, half on top of his back. Both of them were far too late to be able to catch Blake as he plummeted.

 _No_ , the word sounded in Clint’s head like a foghorn. _Not like this._

He waited for the inevitable splat.

What he got instead was America Chavez scooping Blake out of the air, bridal-style, and tipping them a wink as she swooped off.

“Take him to Nat!” Clint called after her, with what breath he could muster given how sharply Phil’s hipbone was poking into his stomach.

“Huh,” said Phil, and sat up, dislodging Clint, who rolled off just far enough to give Phil the room he needed.

That was the end of Clint’s interest in Felix Blake, just at that moment. He was alive, America would make sure he wasn’t allowed to escape, and beyond that Clint couldn’t care less. 

There had been a time, and not long past either, when he’d been almost pathetically grateful to Agent Blake for his friendship and his badass ways, that the idea of _not caring_ about Blake would have been utterly foreign to him. He figured that had to be true of Phil, too. The Cheese who’d fallen in love with his Holly in the middle of a war zone, and who’d saved his life more than once, probably would have tried to hitch a ride down on a grappling line to make sure Blake was secure, in whatever sense of the word.

All that was in the past, however.

Their present selves turned to each other like iron filings to magnets. Between one breath and the next, Clint went from sprawled to kneeling, his thighs between Phil’s and his nose buried deep in Phil’s hair, caught in a crushing embrace. He dug his hands into Phil’s back as if he could somehow melt through the layers of kevlar and cotton that separated them. Phil’s arms trembled around him from the force of his clasp. 

“Thank fuck,” Clint whispered when he could finally find his voice again. “Thought I’d gotten you fucking killed-- or at best I was gonna have to plan a prison break. I’m so sorry.”

Phil’s only response was a long shudder, starting at his waist and ending at his shoulders. He tightened his grip and laughed into Clint’s neck. Clint squirmed at the tickle of his breath.  
“You, no. Never. Don’t be an idiot. Clint you’re perfect. _Perfect_ , my god. Perfect aim, perfect timing--” His laugh turned into something like a sob. “If anyone was going to get me killed, it was clearly me myself. Got myself caught. Got Kate caught. Nearly let all of you down.”

“Now who’s an idiot?” Clint mumbled. He was rewarded by Phil’s lips in the hollow beneath his ear, giving him a firm, branding sort of kiss, that sent parts of him skyrocketing. “You could never let us down, babe.”

“Woah, hey, time and place, guys. Can we do the PDA after the battle, please?” 

Clint looked over to find Tony standing on the catwalk a cautious distance from them, half hidden in the shadows. He wore one metal gauntlet, a semi-automatic he was training downwards, and a complicated sort of expression on his face.

 

**Two**

 

“Holy shit, it really is you, you inconsiderate bastard,” Tony breathed as he saw Clint’s face full on. “What are you doing here? Are you crazy? Where the hell did you _come_ from?” He dropped the semi to hang by its strap, so that he’d have more room for wild hand gestures.

“Good to see you too Tony,” Clint said evenly-- and that was hard. He hadn’t had to use his Soothing Tony voice in several months, and apparently he’d gotten rusty. The underlying relief was threatening to escape in the form of a giggle.

“What do you want, Stark?” Phil asked, genial as if they’d met at a garden party. Clint shifted, fighting down a very unhelpful reaction to that tone. Tony wasn’t _entirely_ wrong: it was neither the time or the place to indulge the things that Phil’s voice did to him. Ravishing him would have to wait until after they’d won. Sadly.

“That’s a kind of dangerous question at the moment, really open-ended. I’d like a lot of things.” Tony started to pace, hit the railing within half a step, and scowled. He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, and finally settled for ticking things off on his fingers.

“I’d like to know what the hell Clint is doing here,” he started, “and what the hell his excuse for jumping out of my damn Tower is. Oh, and why he was just attached to you at the face, Coulson, and how the fuck he got Bucky into this mess-- which isn’t exactly making Cap happy, by the way, but at least he’s got a forklift to take out his anger on.” He paused, appearing to get lost of a moment, wiggling his pinkie finger as if unsure if it should go up, before finally flipping it. 

“Really, all things considered, I guess my real question is how many kinds of death wish Clint has. But just at the moment I would settle for having JARVIS back. So while I’m dying of curiosity here,” he glared at Clint, “I’d actually prefer to get past you into the control room, because what I hate most is working blind.”

Clint bit his lip. Neither laughter nor tears seemed appropriate at the moment, and one or the other was far too close to the surface. 

“And you don’t think I’m gonna attack you the moment you try and get past me?” he asked, mostly out of morbid curiosity. 

Tony glared at him.

“Barton, at this point I don’t know if you were in on it with Blake and Quinn or not. Or if you are, whether your cuddly little hermit there is too, but one thing I _do_ know, and that’s if you wanted me dead, I’d already be dead. Now lemme in. I’ve got a JARVIS to find.”

“Better hurry up then,” Clint said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the control room, where Skye could be dimly seen alternately poking at her phone and a monitor. “Skye and JARVIS are already at work in there.”

While Tony was standing there spluttering, Clint pulled himself and Phil upright, and Phil grabbed his bow as they went. They didn’t bother to untwine.  
“Shows what you know. JARVIS is completely incommunicado right now,” Tony informed them. “I mean, that bastard Blake did something to jam our communications frequencies, and JARVIS is on the wrong side.”

“JARVIS,” Clint told him with relish, “is on Skye’s phone. Well. A mini-version of him is. I don’t know how it works; she tells me they cooked it up together. Anyway, if you don’t get in there they’re not gonna leave you anything to hack.”

“No, send him in, we need him!” Skye called from the open door. “We’re seeing a thing here that we don’t understand. Before I press the big red button and we maybe all end up in little pieces on the floor I want a second eye.”

“Who the hell is that?” Tony growled, glancing into the control room.

“Clint told you. That’s Skye, formerly with the Rising Tide. You remember,” Phil told him. “The one who tased Grant Ward in the bunker.”

Tony nodded slowly, his eyes beginning to go a little wild, and Clint wondered how long it would be until his big brain started to overheat. _At least he didn’t start ranting about JARVIS being unfaithful. Though maybe he just doesn’t believe us._

“Yeah, I just-- wait. Wait wait wait." He stopped just short of Clint and squinted. 

After a long moment’s examination, Tony reached out to poke at Clint’s beard. Clint batted him away impatiently. 

No one got to touch the damn beard but _Phil_ , as far as Clint was concerned. 

“Stark,” Phil growled. Evidently, Phil shared his point of view on the subject of beard privileges. 

Tony waved them both off, busily doing calculations as he looked between them and the control room, before settling on Clint’s t-shirt. His eyes began to widen.

“Hacker, Coulson, chickens, clothing-- you’re the _cousin_?” This seemed to be the final straw; Tony’s voice cracked and broke, coming down in shards. “ _You_ , Clint Barton, were-- are-- you were Coulson’s convenient cousin who took over on North Bar? You were right… you were _there_ \--”

“All along,” Clint told him, feeling a horrible grin start to poke at the edges of his lips. “‘C'mon, that cannot be your biggest shock of the day.”

Tony stared at him for a long, frozen moment, barely blinking.

“Arg!” he said at last, and stomped into the control room.

Clint watched him go, slamming into the room and already beginning to rant, while Skye raised a quelling eyebrow at him. After making sure they wouldn’t eat each other, Clint turned back to Phil and tugged him in closer again.

“He’s not wrong,” Phil murmured in his ear. “Battle first. Play later. Those two are safe enough up here; we’d better see if we can help down below. I didn’t like the sound of that forklift.”

“Cap can take care of a forklift with one hand tied behind his back,” Clint replied, and nuzzled his nose beneath Phil’s ear, breathing in deeply, trying to draw the scent of sweat and skin all the way into his lungs.

“Then let’s go watch him do that,” Phil said gently. “And help him with the small matter of a few dozen super soldiers. It’s a warren down below, and we have to clear it all.” 

He didn’t move though, except to let one hand drift down to the quiver at Clint’s hip and finger one of the shafts there. Clint gathered him tightly in and gave into temptation, kissing him the way he’d wanted to do since Phil’d left that morning, the way that, by noon, he’d suspected he might never get to do again: like everything past was washed away and everything to come altered by the press of their four lips.

“Stay safe,” Clint muttered when he pulled away.

The look Phil gave him spoke volumes, though mostly in one word: hypocrite.

“I always do,” he said.

Which just went to show that Phil was quite capable of calling the kettle black.

“No, you really don’t,” Clint told him, and he pulled another arrow out of his quiver, nocking it even as he moved back and found his target.

Phil was watching him when he turned back, a faint smile on his face.

“Fair enough,” Phil said. He tucked himself against Clint’s chest and clung. Clint tipped them both off the cat then fired, sending the grappling arrow upwards to hook into the railing and swing them both to safety.

\----

From general melee, the fight had slowly undergone mitosis, breaking off little fightlets that migrated under the shadows of the overhanging superstructure into every corner of the floor and up onto the catwalks. 

Meanwhile, the warehouse floor had grown increasingly obstacle-prone, with several large pallet-loads scattered like the toy blocks of giants and two forklifts overturned and smoking. The guy with the metal arm had recovered quickly from being hit by one of the forklifts, somersaulting his way up from the tines, landing on its cab then reaching down to yank the driver out. Captain America had dealt with the other by bouncing his shield off a girder and through the forklift’s cab, taking the driver out at the neck. 

Metal Arm was dealing with a third, currently, by stepping behind it and tipping it over, then climbing on top of it. He looked like he was playing king of the mountain. At her distance, Kate felt like she was playing a game, too, and it seemed more than slightly unfair. 

_I should be down there, getting hit, getting dirty, like America is. It’s only fair._

She shook the thought out of her head, aimed, and drew.

“He bit me, Kate. He actually _bit_ me. Shouldn’t an Agent of SHIELD be above that or something?” 

Kate jumped, loosing the arrow more quickly than she’d intended. She slewed around to find America leaning on the far railing, cradling her arm and twisting a scrap of fabric around it, and sounding horribly bitter.

“Yeah, well,” Kate replied, shouldering her bow and taking over the bandaging work, “what do you want me to do about it? Put an arrow up his ass?”

America sighed, ruffling Kate’s bangs with the force of her breath.

“Little late now, he ran off somewhere down there. I’m gonna go look around outside for a second, see if we’ve got any backup coming yet. Agent Blake can be somebody else’s big problem.”

“‘Kay,” Kate said patting America’s arm and adjusting the bandage a final time. “You go do that.” She caught America’s hand just as she was pulling away, and gave her a quick kiss. “And stay safe, babe.”

“Always do,” America said, the dirty liar, and she flew off.

\----

“Have we got it?” Skye asked, staring over Stark’s shoulder. (Yeah, _Stark’s_ shoulder, as in Tony-freaking-Stark, founder-of-Stark Industries-Stark, Iron Man-Stark, right there, in the control room, hacking _next to her._ And holy shit she had to stop that line of thought before she left a puddle of drool all the way down his collarbone.) 

Tony-the-living-end-Stark, oblivious to his own charms for once, frowned down at the keyboard and rattled away for another moment.

“Just… one… more… minute--aha! Yes! Come to me my own, my JARVIS!” 

Stark fell backwards, pumping his fist in the air, and Skye caught her breath. The monitor in front of them had blacked out for a moment just at the end. Now it was filling with data, pouring in from every direction in regimented blue streams.

“Hello, Sir,” JARVIS said, his voice tinny as it emanated from the speakers on Skye’s phone. She jumped, holding it up. “It is good to be in contact with you again. However, while I understand your need to perform your, as you call it, ‘celebratory booty dance’ at this moment, when you finish you may wish to turn your attention to two items.”

Skye watched Stark halt right in the middle of said celebratory shimmy and turn serious, the change as sudden as if someone had flipped a switch.

“What items?” he asked, moving back to the monitor.

“Ms. Skye and my stand-alone self on her phone identified them, and when we synced just now I uploaded them to analyze. I believe I have found two items of interest. One: there is a feed emanating from this room, issuing some kind of control algorithm to every one of the Cybertek super soldiers.”

Skye looked down at the warehouse floor and flinched involuntarily. When she looked back, Stark caught her gaze, and she saw reflected in them the same depth of disgust that was filling her, right down to the substrata of fear underlying it.

“Okay, that’s… not good” she said slowly, watching Stark closely for cues. “Wanna tell us what else, JARV? Can’t be as bad as that was.”

“No, Ms Skye, it is not. I would categorize it as ‘worse.’”

 

**Three**

 

America had come zipping back inside very quickly, after her scouting trip out the custom-busted hole in the roof, to yell that a boat had showed up and was anyone expecting visitors? 

As it turned out, the boat belonged to Quinn’s moving crew, ready to ferry away the last vestiges of the super soldier factory that had once existed in the warehouse. They were more than a little surprised to be met at the door not by someone with an inventory checklist, but by Agent Triplett and Agent May with icers.

Kate watched them push the boat crew back out the door then turned back to the fight at hand. 

She’d done her best, picking off soldiers in ones and twos. She _hated_ the eye shot, it sent acid boiling in the back of her throat every time she blinded another person-- but it was the only way to stop the soldiers, it seemed like. If she shot them anywhere else, they seemed to brush it off like a junkie high on acid. (Thanks, DARE, O thou font of drug-related scare tactics, that little story had been the cause of so many nightmares.) Unluckily-- or maybe luckily, for Kate’s peace of mind later-- the opportunity for an eye shot was rare.

Captain America and Metal Arm were the two Avengers left out on the floor, and neither of them seemed at all worried by the mismatch in the opposition. Captain America’d even bounded up a pile of boxes in pursuit of one of the soldiers. At the top, he’d gotten caught on a huge hook, which some smarter-than-the-average-super soldier had been lowering by pulley. 

Realizing he’d hooked an unexpected fish, the soldier had lost no time trying to reel him in. Captain America flailed as he rose higher, suspended by his belt. Metal Arm guy’d just seen him, and was too busy laughing to be of much help.

Kate fought down a giggle of her own and sighted. The soldier at the other end of the chain went down in a heap. The chain itself leapt freely in the pulley and descended with a rattling clang. The Avenger on the end of it disappeared into the boxes, which exploded outward in a tidal wave, taking down a half dozen super soldiers.

When Captain America appeared again, surfing the tail end of the box tsunami, Metal Arm helped him up, shaking his head slowly. 

They both turned back to the fight, and Kate grabbed another arrow-- her last.

_This is getting ridiculous. Someone’s got to be doing something to end this, right?_

\----

Once she finally got into the warren underneath the second-story control room, Natasha paused. The space beneath the overhang was a series of intersecting corridors, broken up into blocks of offices and storage rooms. At any rate, that’s what Blake’s stolen schematics had shown. Those, unfortunately, were now suspect. 

_Now was he planning on us killing Quinn, or Quinn killing_ us _?_

If the former, they’d be accurate. If the latter…. Natasha sighed. Nothing for it but to remain vigilant and assume there were traps. She broke down the first door, a fragile pressed-board affair, with a single kick, and looked in.

The closet had been scraped bare as bones, and was something of the same pale color, even in the dark. Natasha gave it a cursory glance anyway, just for form’s sake.

She was about to retreat when a flash of urine yellow in the corner caught her eye. It could have been nothing-- it was more than _likely_ nothing, maybe just insulation visible through a crack in the drywall. Even so, Natasha found herself slinking cautiously forward and checking it out.

 _Oh, hell_ she thought, poking at the mass, which was indeed sticking through a spot where something heavy had shattered the drywall. _Is that… is that worked _into_ the walls?_

On further inspection, she thought it was, the little mass of plasticine. Worked right in between two panels of drywall and probably pressed into the hollow spaces of the load-bearing girder at the corner. _Building the demolition right into it, now that’s forward thinking._ It occurred to her just how lucky they all were that Clint’s earlier exploding arrow had somehow missed any of the detonation cord that must also have been threaded through the building’s skeleton.

She’d just started to back away when the comm crackled to life in her ear, and Tony’s voice came through. Natasha decided never to tell him now profound a relief it was to hear him buzz in her head again.

“Hey,” he was saying over the line, “two things. No-- okay, three things. First thing: Skye and I are gonna take care of the super soldiers, so maybe just back off a moment okay? That means _you_ , Cap, I can see you with that shield, you put that away now. Everyone knows you’re the better specimen of a fightin’ man. Second thing, can the two gentlemen with super strength please exit the building and help the young lady who is currently trying to lift an entire boat with her bare hands? It’s a little tippy, that’s all. And third thing, it looks like this place is rigged to blow, so _please_ be careful.”

 _Yeah_ , Natasha thought, _will do._

\----

“Okay… okay… hold up I think I got it,” Skye said, and pressed Enter a final time. The monitor stuttered, then spat out a stream of feeds, dozens of them, each corresponding to a name.

“Adewole, A.; Warsame, M.; Miller, J.; Vue, C..; Vampa, L.; Peterson, M. My god, they were… how did they manage all that? They had to have them on automated orders, there’s no way just Felix Blake could handle all of them at once. Here,” Tony swallowed down what was probably, if Skye were judging by her own esophagus, a truckload of bile, and pointed at a name. “Pull that up.”

Skye did. 

They both gasped when the feed came up on the monitor.

It was a soldier’s-eye view of the fighting, and from the angle it looked like the soldier was currently struggling upright and facing down a very angry Victoria Hand and her very large gun. And below it, _below_ it, where the soldier could still _see_ , blinked a cursor.

Skye and Tony looked at each other. Then at the monitor, where the soldier and Hand were in some sort of stand-off, with Hand yelling at him to drop his weapon.

“Um,” Skye said, and thought a moment. Then she typed.

_HI. PUT YOUR WEAPON DOWN._

The soldier froze for a moment, but his display didn’t dip or bend like she’d have expected if he were complying.

_WEAPON. DOWN. PLEASE._

_I DON’T WANT TO HURT YOU BUT I WILL IF I HAVE TO._

After a moment, the soldier dipped, just a tiny bit, and he glanced down at his arm as he lowered it, so that she could see the mini-crossbow mounted to his bracer (no really?) retract. When the view came back up, Agent Hand was staring at him incredulously.

“Are they all like that?” Tony asked after a moment, but he didn’t wait for Skye to answer his question. “God. Eye implants. Imagine if someone was watching you jer--er, germinate… seedlings….”

“Yeah, or even worse, they might watch you masturbate,” Skye replied, as sunnily as she possibly could, just to hear him choke. “Okay, are we still doing this?”

“We don’t have a choice,” Tony said, and set his fingers back on the keyboard. “I just hope it doesn’t blow anything out, or they’re all dead. And I… that’s not really what we’re going for here.”

“Uh huh,” Skye breathed, looked at him, and then nodded. “Let’s do it.”

They did, and it was hilariously simple. Just their fingers flying for a half minute, filling in a few lines of coding-- so little really-- and watching on the monitor as a dozen, two dozen names went from green to red.

On the feed of their chosen super soldier, a message, repeating, crossed the bottom of the frame: 

_CONNECTION TO CONTROL SEVERED. NO FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS OR COERCION WILL BE FORTHCOMING. FLY AWAY BIRDIE. BE FREE._

Below them on the warehouse floor, the super soldiers faltered. It didn’t happen all at once, but in ones and twos, then clots of threes and fours and mores, they began to lower weapons, to blink, shake their heads, pause in the middle of punches. 

Skye held her breath, remembering the days she’d watched Wheel of Fortune on the tv in the afternoons at the orphanage, hiding in one of the Sister’s sitting rooms with her and eating strawberry candies. Back then, she’d held her breath in just the same way as the wheel slowed down, tick tick tick. As if she could change the wheel’s fate from a thousand miles away, just by glaring at the TV screen.

Slowly, all of the fighting stopped, as Quinn’s soldiers waited, whether to find out if the message had been real, or what the others would do, Skye didn’t know. 

What was left of Agent Hand’s team: herself, Triplett, the dark-haired woman who must be Agent May, and a few others she couldn’t identify, paused as well. They kept their weapons trained, and took the opportunity to put their backs together.

Several of the soldiers, scattered randomly throughout the room, seemed to straighten a little, as if coming to some decision.

After a moment, one of them moved, picking his gun back up, and looking it over like it was a forgotten toy he’d just found imprinted in the lawn, when the last snowdrifts melted. There was an unexpected delicacy to his motions as he raised it.

He aimed, fired-- and hit another soldier straight between the eyes.

In another few moments, the soldiers had forgotten their SHIELD enemies and turned on each other. Tony was shaking his head in horror. Skye poked at the data feeds, flipping from one to the other, in a desperate search for some way to stop it all.

“So, okay, some of them are here of their own free-- and kinda jerky-- will,” Skye said, as if saying it out loud would somehow allow her to forget the reality of what she was seeing.

“And some of them… are getting even now,” Tony finished for her.

 _Now that they can_ , Skye thought, and shuddered.

 

**Four**

 

Ian Quinn was nearly to the back door when she finally found him, his back facing her as he looked off down the last little corridor that led to escape. She could even see the sunlight streaming from a grated clerestory window set just above the door. The dust motes were dancing around him and he was frozen, still as a vole just before it hears the cat’s bell. A large bandage swathing his shoulder-- and the absence of a broken arrow shaft-- told Natasha why he hadn’t disappeared before she’d even gotten there. 

_Idiot. Get out first, get medical care second._ Then again, he might reasonably have bled out before he made it to a doctor, given the amount of land and sea between him and the nearest hospital. But why was he hesitating now? 

The answer became clear when Natasha finally slid around the corner, an icer (borrowed from Agent Triplett, because she was damned if she was going to let Quinn or Blake die before she got a chance to question them), held tight in her lead hand. She’d used her Bites so often already that afternoon that they were currently re-charging-- nearly ready but not yet reliable. _Have to ask Tony to work on_ that _, too, when we get out of here._

“... good attempt, but you got too clever, Blake,” Quinn was saying, because Felix Blake was standing there in his battered kevlar and torn shirtsleeves, the last obstacle between Quinn and liberty. His face was bruised, the shoelace of his remaining shoe was untied, and he still had that little sardonic half-smile on his lips.

Quinn kept talking, wheedling, even though Blake seemed far past the reach of words to Natasha. 

“Why don’t we both just get out of here while the Avengers are occupied,” Quinn said, holding his hands out. “Then you go your way-- and I go mine?”

“Your helicopter waiting?” Blake asked and Quinn nodded his head cautiously. 

Blake had to be holding _something_ , Natasha thought, or why hadn’t Quinn just rushed the man? Granted, yes, Quinn was slimy, and a coward, but he was also determined enough to rush an unarmed man, if necessary, in order to save his own tail. So Blake had to be armed, and she doubted it was with anything as benign as her icer.

“We’ll have to get to the landing pad the next island over, but yes. The helicopter’s there. Could get you out of here with me. Just let it _go._ ”

“Thing is, Ian,” Blake said, “I don’t want you getting out of here.”

He looked over Quinn’s shoulder and straight at Natasha for a split second, his eyes piercing, before deliberately turning away. His smile was half dreamy and half wolf, and Natasha wanted to scream at Quinn just to _run_. That it wasn’t Felix Blake after all, it was someone who looked just like him, some parallel dimension Blake or else some golem with his face.

“You can’t be serious. Blake, it’s _over._ ” Quinn sounded desperate. “You don’t even have a _gun_ , what are you going to do, strangle me? Even if you did, you can’t take them all out. You lost-- whatever the hell game you were playing, you _lost._ ”

Had it been just a minute ago that Natasha’d thought Blake must have a weapon, to account for Quinn not having rushed him? She’d been wrong; his smile was deterrent enough.

Blake appeared to consider Quinn’s point for a moment, before snorting.

“You remember Grant Ward, right, Ian? Hell, you knew him before you knew me. Good agent. Hopeless at normal social interactions. Best marks for espionage since Romanov-- that’s the Black Widow, to you.”

Grant Ward had known Ian Quinn before Blake had? Well _that_ was new information indeed. She’d barely paid attention to Jawbones except to admire the work Skye’d done on him with her taser, but perhaps she’d have to make a point to get reacquainted with him.

Later. He could hardly be her main concern right now.

_SHIELD doesn’t give top marks to a social misfit._

“What does that have to do with anything?” Quinn snapped at Blake, clearly taken off guard.

“The point is this,” Blake said, not losing a millimeter off the twist at the end of his lip, “I may be a Johnny-Come-Lately to this… _effort_ of yours to build a better mercenary corps and license the do-it-yourself kit, but John Garrett was there from the beginning. Oh-- sorry: the Clairvoyant. That had to be a shock to you, finding out that the Clairvoyant was dead-- and that you’d been working with Hydra all along.”

“Not as much of a shock as I’d imagine it was to you,” Quinn said, clearly trying to recover his usual oozy certainty. “I never met him in person, you know.”

He ran his hand through his hair and stepped back, looking to both sides of him like if he just tried hard enough he could find another exit. Whatever Quinn saw must not have been very satisfying, because after a moment he re-engaged, growing more agitated with every word that tumbled out of his mouth.

“Blake, I don’t know what the hell you’re trying to infer here, but if you think it’s about Hydra, you’re as much of an idiot as that jackass Hawkeye was, when he made the same accusations on my yacht. All you SHIELD agents have Hydra on the brain. This is not now, and never was, a Hydra operation! If Garrett was Hydra, fine, he was on the side. You never blinked when you found out he’d helped found Project Deathlok, why blink now?”

“I’m not blinking,” Blake said, and truly he wasn’t. In fact, the lack of blinking was growing somewhat disturbing to Natasha. “I’m asking you to think back, and remember. The Clairvoyant found this site for you, convinced you to split your operations, set up here as well as New Mexico. He even had the blueprints drawn up and the construction started before-- well, before he died in the Battle for New York. What I’m telling you now is that Grant Ward was with him the whole time he worked here-- and Grant Ward knows what he put in the walls.”

 _And so do I_ , Natasha thought, even as she tried to commit as much as possible of that speech to memory, and especially the parts about split operations and other states. _Other sites. And I bet only these two and Ward himself can tell us where they are. Terrific._

“What…” Quinn broke off before finishing the question, for the first time taking his eyes off Blake to look around. There was nothing showing of course, but his voice wavered a little as he continued. “What did he put in the walls?”

“Explosives,” Natasha replied, stepping into the hallway. Blake had seen her already, hell, had clearly made at least part of his speech for her benefit. There was little point in hiding. Anyway, every step closer she got was a step that might allow her to take out one or both of them, before they hit the outdoors. “Inside the walls, along the supporting beams. Enough to bury any evidence at this facility in a molten heap of slag.”

“Exactly, Agent Romanov,” Blake said, in a gentle voice. “And that, Ian, is why you can’t leave. I need you found in the wreckage with everyone else-- or what’s left of them. I need you to be my posthumous patsy, this one last time. I _am_ glad you brought your chopper.”

“Why--” Quinn started, looking back at Natasha as if she might bring some kind of sanity to the party. She quickly disabused him of the notion.

“Because he’s going to kill you, leave in the chopper, and detonate the explosives when he’s a safe distance away, Mr. Quinn,” Natasha told him. “And he’ll kill me as well-- or try to-- so that I can’t get out and warn the others. He’s counting on your soldiers to keep them occupied until the charges go. He still has the New Mexico facility to fall back on, after all.”

Quinn’s eyes were widening, and Natasha fought the urge to slap him. _What did you expect from your co-conspirators, Mr. Quinn? Marquis of Queensbury rules?_

“It won’t _work_ , Felix,” she said, directing herself to Blake. “Apart from being mad, it’s too late. Phil and Victoria were in contact with Director Fury before they even got here. SHIELD knows _everything_ now, and they’re coming. Even if you kill us, you’ll still get caught in the end.”

Blake’s smile made her want to dunk herself in scalding water. That, too, might wash away the stain this interlude was putting over all their past history.

“They don’t know everything. Oh not even close. Unfortunately, a few people here know… a little too much.” His eyes drifted back to Quinn-- then darted to her face. He winced, a barely-there tightening of the skin around his eyes, and Natasha was enlightened.

 _Quinn… and me. Me? What, that drivel he was talking about waking up with his memories gone?_ That _was dangerous?_

“You don’t want to do this Felix, you really don’t,” she said, and took another step forward. 

“Grant,” Blake said.

For a split second, Natasha thought it was a non-sequitur. Then she heard a minute shuffle behind her.

 _’Grant?’ Ward! Shit!_

Natasha spun. 

The movement brought her face-to-sternum with Agent Ward, much battered and a little wobbly, caught in the act of sneaking up behind her, one arm already outstretched to grab. _Best marks since me. Huh._ She struck first, taking advantage of his split instant of shock to drive an elbow into his kidney and follow it up with a kick that slammed him backwards into the wall. He’d just started to bring his hands up by the time she managed to wrap her knees around his neck and bring him down with her thighs.

One moment she had Ward on the floor. The next, he’d managed to yank her own feet out from under her, and she cracked her head _hard_. Her icer went flying. He ignored it and scrambled to his knees, grabbing the handgun from her hip holster as he did. Natasha didn’t let him keep it long, throwing him back down and sending the gun spinning out of his hand and off down the concrete like a badly-weighted curling stone.

He wrestled her back down before she could go for either weapon, and she put them out of her mind in favor of dispatching him the old fashioned way.

Ward was fast and wily, Natasha could admit that much without prejudice. SHIELD trained its agents well. Between Garrett and Blake, Ward had been given two of Clint’s old SOs to learn from, after all. It wasn’t a wonder that he could fight like an attenuated, cut-jawed Tasmanian devil. It didn’t take long for him to flip her onto her back and pin her. 

He grinned down at her like he didn’t realize he was begging for a knee to the gonads for the sheer principle of the thing. Natasha debated the merits of doing just that, showing him what he’d missed by not working with Nick If You’re Fighting Fair You’ve Failed Fury, versus the merits of just knocking him out with a head butt.

Decisions, decisions. 

She took too long with hers, and events took her choice away.

“Blake, no--” Quinn shouted from above them, and then “Oof,” as something smacked into him.

And then a shot rang out. 

Three-- actually. If anyone was counting.

Natasha’d heard enough of them in her life-- sudden explosions of cordite turning into gas, contained in a slim steel chamber, and the thunk of jacketed lead as it hit flesh. Up close they made ears ring. Long, long use had worn away some of the startle reflex that went along with an unexpected shot, or channelled it to other purposes.

In this case, they channelled Natasha’s knee straight into Ward’s groin.

She left him curled in a ball, far more interested in what had happened to that damned bullet.

She’d expected it to be Quinn lying on the floor with a bullet in him-- he deserved it, past any doubt, and Blake had been determined to give it to him-- and indeed he was there, gasping and flopping like somebody’s fish fry in waiting. He wasn’t the one with the bullet hole in his shoulder, though, and the blood on his shirt was someone else’s entirely.

Phil’s blood, to be specific. 

Phil, who’d appeared seemingly out of nowhere, was lying half on top of Quinn, with two bullet holes pocking the front of his kevlar vest-- and a wound in his shoulder just at the edge of it. He was still glaring at Felix Blake. 

Blake was staring at him incredulously, still holding Natasha’s gun, though he’d forgotten to keep it raised. The look was one Natasha was more than passingly familiar with, from when Blake used to use it on Clint. It was his What The Fuck Were You Thinking face, and it spoke loudly enough that he’d never had to _say_ the words.

Phil seemed completely unimpressed by the face, though that might have been because he’d _just been shot_.

“No,” he rasped. Then, “ow.” And “ow,” again

“That was completely uncalled for,” Felix told him, as if it was part of some larger domestic argument between them, like whose turn it was to take out the trash. “What good is he to you?”

“F’r Clint,” Phil gasped, struggling upright-- and sending fresh pulses of red leaking out onto his shirt, because apparently he hadn’t injured himself enough for his own satisfaction just by jumping in front of a bullet. “Need him a’ive, for interrogay… shun. F’r Clint.”

 _Oh god_ Natasha thought to herself, _nothing makes a man so dumb as love._

She pulled her secondary pistol out of its holster at the small of her back and advanced on Blake. 

“Hands up, Felix,” she said, keeping her voice steady only by not looking at Phil at _all_. 

And then Grant Ward grabbed her around the waist and pulled her backwards. Her shot went wide, hitting the ceiling.

“Get out!” he was shouting to Blake, even while he wrestled her down and grabbed at her gun hand, “Sir! Get clear. I’ll follow.”

 _I am getting a wee bit tired of having this overgrown hound trying to bring me home to master_ Natasha thought, and employed her elbow again, this time to the broad, enticing target presented by his jaw. That was her second goddamn pistol gone missing, and she wasn’t happy about it at all.

“In a minute, I’ve got unfinished business here” Blake said, his voice even. He still had eyes only for Phil, and he’d brought his gun up, aiming it with almost exaggerated care. “Phil, I’m sorry. I never wanted to have to hurt you, I hope you know that. You’re just kind of in the way. I’ll--”

Whatever else he was going to say was cut off in a snarl and thump.

Natasha managed to struggle off of Grant Ward just in time to see Clint start to rise, his legs shaking, backing away from Felix Blake, who was lying stunned on the floor. Clint’s bow was still slung over his shoulder and his quiver was empty, which explained why he’d had to come to close quarters-- he must have left all his arrows in things (or persons) as he hunted them down. 

There was only so much attention she could spare for Clint at the minute, especially since he’d disarmed Blake and she was still fighting Ward. _Their_ continuing battle had rolled them close to her discarded pistol. 

She and Ward grabbed for it at once.

It happened the way such things happen in the movies.

Hell, it was pretty much a cliché: two people struggling for a gun. Two _other_ people struggling with each other, just a few feet away. Everyone at cross-purposes and a loaded weapon coming to bear almost accidentally during the course of the struggle.

In the movies it all happened in slow-motion, of course, with time to think and breathe and fear. Time for that long, drawn-out yell of negation, those widened eyes.

In real life, well-- it wasn’t the first time Natasha had heard a shot, seen the blood bloom, and only _afterwards_ processed whether she was the one who’d pulled the trigger. 

She was not. She would not have, not at such close range.

The thought itself only came later. By the time she’d slowed down enough to even think it, she’d already felt the little vibration at her wrist that meant her damn Bites had fully charged at _last_ , and she’d shoved one in Grant Ward’s damned smug puppyface and tased him for approximately the umpteenth time that day.

Then she’d scooped up the icer and shot Blake. Twice. Just because she could.

Then and _only_ then did Natasha let herself see Clint, crumpled on the floor and bleeding sluggishly from somewhere up high. 

She crawled over to him and looked down. 

He smiled up at her, hazy through the dust, eyes blinking and wet. Somehow, the beard and the flop of sweaty hair made him look younger and, just in that moment, more vulnerable.

“Hey,” she said, hating how her voice sounded, and went searching for his wound. She found it in his bicep, right up near the top of his shoulder. He winced as she set to work on it.

“Hey, ‘self,” said Clint, sounding entirely wrecked. “Um… how’s Phil?”

Natasha looked up, against her will, to find that Phil had dragged himself to a sitting position against the wall, one hand shoved into his own bullet wound. He looked down at Clint with a smile so soft it threatened to drip off his chin. 

“‘M okay, Clint,” he said, and proved it by flopping over to his other side, right next to his prone lover. 

“Hi, Phil,” Clint greeted him, “‘Fraid I just undid all your good work. Oops?”

“S’alright,” Phil told him, and brushed his cheek. “We c’n do it up again.”

“Hey look-- we mostly match.” Clint pointed a trembling finger first at his wound, then Phil’s. “Copycat.”

 _Well_ , thought Natasha grimly as she put pressure on his wound, _at least his suspect sense of humor is in place._

 

**Five**

 

Ian Quinn, naturally, took the lack of upright agents-- except Natasha-- as his opportunity to skedaddle.

He’d managed to play possum for the latter part of the fight in the little hallway, curled up against a wall. Now he pushed himself up, and leapt over Phil, Clint, Blake, and their commingling blood, headed for the door.

Natasha sighed and reached for her icer.

In the event, she didn’t bother to shoot.

The door opened before Quinn could lay a hand on it, slamming back into the wall and rebounding slightly.

In the doorway, outlined in the brilliant sunlight, stood a small black chicken.

“Bawk,” said the chicken, and stepped forward daintily.

Natasha honestly thought that she’d finally lost it. Or else some vestige of her youthful memory alterations was coming back to haunt her-- it wouldn’t have been the first time-- or maybe that she’d been shot herself and the chicken was coming for her probably-nonexistent soul. Any one of the options made as much sense as the possibility that Ian Quinn was being advanced upon by Tasha the Hen, last seen sitting on top of a roost in her hen house on North Bar and idly pecking Tony the Hen on the head.

Wanda Jackson stepped in the door behind the chicken, looking extremely put-upon, and neatly completing Natasha’s sense of unreality.

Nick Fury followed in her considerable wake, just as exasperated as she was and half again as tall. They were like the Laurel and Hardy of being done with this shit.

“Oh for heaven’s sake, it looks like the last act of Hamlet in here,” Wanda snapped as she took them all in. “I told you not to wait for us, Mr. Fury.”

Fury opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again in favor of a subvocal growl. Natasha resisted the urge to slink in a corner, as well as the urge to burst out into semi-hysterical laughter. Ian Quinn just gave up and sat down on the floor, banging his head against a wall, waiting for it all to end.

“‘S okay, Marcus,” Phil said, from his position on the floor, “We got ‘em all. You seen Clint? Don’ put… don’t put him in the Fridge, ‘kay? ‘S not him. Don’ take him away.”

“Cheese,” Fury sighed, and left it there-- possibly because even that one word came out ragged at the edges. 

There was probably dust in his eye. That would account for all the blinking. Natasha certainly thought the place could stand a good vacuuming.

“How,” Natasha asked, standing on shaky legs and coming forward to scoop up her namesake hen, “did you get here, Ms. Jackson? And… how did Tasha?” She indicated the chicken, who was settling into her arms with firm little butt wiggles and dissatisfied clucks.

Fury started at the sound of the name and looked up at her with one of those _when you and I have an hour somewhere without surveillance_ faces that were usually portents of exceptionally nasty debriefs.

“By boat,” Wanda told her, huffing as if it ought to have been obvious. Natasha stared her down, bringing the entire weight of her exhaustion and her grief to bear.

Wanda held her gaze, steady and unmoving as a breakwater, for a long moment. At last she relented, and nodded at Tasha. 

“I’d gone to North Bar to check on Coulson’s flock, since all your friends had hared off to go get their fool selves into trouble without a thought for the poultry. I found a guy calling himself Dr. Banner there before me-- friend of yours and Coulson’s, he said. 

“He got a call from some British guy while we were feeding the chickens. He seemed pretty desperate to get here, so we took my motorboat. Which I’m gonna be needing reimbursement for, since we were only halfway here before the British guy called again, and Bruce suddenly got all big and green on me. _He_ brought _me_ the rest of the way.”

Natasha and Fury both had the grace to wince at that.

_Well, I guess Bruce found his answers, anyway._

“And… Tasha?” she asked, because of all things that required the most explanation.

“Our stowaway here?” Wanda indicated the chicken with a wag of her chin. “Found her under the boat’s bench-- she came along tucked up all cozy in my arms, when the boat, uh, became irrelevant. Mr. Fury here met us on the landing. Have you seen the size of his jet?”

“And the Hulk?” Natasha asked, feeling faint. “Where… where is he now--” She broke off, because the resounding crash and roar from back out in the warehouse proper made it unnecessary for her to finish the question.

_And Fury met them at the landing. Right. Well, I guess any remaining resistance is effectively squashed now._

“Hrmph,” Fury said, contemplatively. “Chicken seems surprisingly chill. We sure it’s not a shapeshifter or something?” 

He was watching Tasha closely, hands on his hips holding back his long black coat, and he seemed less than impressed with the gravity of the situation.

“You realize this whole place is rigged to explode?” Natasha asked him, and had the satisfaction of watching him blanch, his one eye going round.

Tony’s voice floated down the hall towards them, high and thin. He yelling, loud enough to echo through the corridors.

“No, no, Big Guy, no smash! No-- damnit, you’ll get us all killed-- NO SMASH!” 

And that was it, it was half past Bug Out O’Clock, as Clint would say. Natasha gathered her chicken more tightly to her, raised her chin, and started for the door.

“All right,” Fury agreed, as she walked past him. He tapped his finger to the comm in his ear. “Get the team in here now to grab the casualties and get ‘em to the Bus; we’ll sort them all out when we get to medical. I want to blow this joint, before the Hulk does.”

When the Director talked, SHIELD walked; Phil and Clint, Blake and Ward, and all the various agents scattered about the front of the warehouse were bustled efficiently onboard the Globemaster that had appeared on the back lawn sometime during the final stages of the battle.

Tony _did_ manage to stop the Hulk before he managed to explode the warehouse. He did so mostly through the expedient of redirecting his big, green rage on the boat that Captain America, Miss America, and the Winter Soldier had already subdued, and which had been lying harmlessly on its side on the docks.

In the end it didn’t matter. The warehouse blew up anyway.

\----  
To be continued....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: questions, answers, rest, and resolutions.
> 
> There! That’s the main action, guys. Next chapter’s still long and meaty, but at least you shouldn’t go into it biting your knuckles, right?
> 
> Also, next chapter is still estimated to arrive Sunday March 22, and yes it really will be the last chapter. Someone find me a hanky. It’s dusty in here.


	26. Portolans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where they’ve been, what they’ve been doing, and who they’ve hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: frequent pining after chickens.

**One**

Clint didn’t even bother to open his eyes before he sighed, took in a deep noseful of hot, dry, lysol-scented air, and said:

“SHIELD medical. Not the ICU… good, didn’t think I needed that. At least second floor if not third, interior wing and… lemme check,” he blinked his eyes open and looked at the ceiling. “Room 312. Yes?”

“Yes, Clint” Nat said, and that _did_ complete the familiar environmental profile. He tilted his head to the right, to find her sitting next to him in one of the vinyl-covered chairs endemic to the facility. She’d had enough time to change at any rate, though the yoga pants and hoodie plus the sleeked-back hair suggested she was still relatively fresh from the fight.

There were no exterior windows, not in this section, not when SHIELD medical knew his tendency to turn them into impromptu egress points, so he had no sun to guide him. The scent of thin, salty gravy and boiled green beans floated past his nose. He listened for a moment, but no squeaky cart noises made themselves known. 

“A little past dinner time,” he said. “Haven’t been out so long. Good.” He grunted and tried to sit up, only to be stopped by a pinching in the back of his hand. “Well I’m not drugged,” he said, looking down at the IV trailing from his hand and up the IV stand to a rather deflated bag of clear fluid. “So… glucose?”

“How often do you _do_ this, anyway?” asked a voice from his left, and Clint flopped his head back around. Kate and America were both sitting in the other visitor chair, though by rights it should only have held one of them. They were both, also, in black sweats, and Clint fought not to grin and pat Nat on the thigh.

_Not your subtlest, Nat, not your subtlest._

“I’m out of practice,” he told her. “I lucked out on the room.”

Natasha pointed upwards, where a series of small pockmarks dotted the drop ceiling, in a vague target shape.

“I got bored, okay?” Clint said, “and they should know better than to leave projectiles around me.”

“They didn’t, Clint, you splintered the particle board.”

“I was _really_ bored,” Clint mouthed to Kate, who started giggling. It felt good-- it felt great, actually, to see her. Suspiciously good. “And really high. Speaking of, Nat, what’s my dosing schedule?”

“You got Doctor Abdirahman, Clint. Nothing ‘till you wake up; she still remembers that time after Quito. Nurse should be by shortly.”

Oh, then the giddy feeling wasn’t drugs. 

Something else then.

Something….

Clint turned his focus to that pock-marked ceiling a moment, trying to sort memories into a rational shape.

He’d been conscious slightly longer than Phil was, long enough to remember being loaded onto the revamped Globemaster plane that had, apparently, housed Felix Blake and his team for the past couple years. Fury’d sat with them as two kids bustled about doing field dressings and nattering a mile a minute to each other in a couple varieties of Brit-speak. Clint must already have been hallucinating at the time, because he could have sworn the kids kept having to move Tasha the Hen from various perches. 

Through the agents that came to debrief Fury, Clint learned that Natasha’d taken control of the girls-- and clearly still had control of them, bless her forever-- and that the hold was stacked with super soldiers. 

“Blake’n’Quinn?” he rasped, and Fury had looked over.

“Jumpjet,” he had said briefly. “With Melinda and Hand and Captain America.”

“Kay,” Clint had nodded, and then: “Sorry ‘bout the mess.” 

Time had started skipping then-- he remembered Wanda Jackson coming in to remove the chicken, Bobbi Morse of all people whispering an apology in his ear, Phil’s chest rising and falling, Tony and Fury having a minor argument in a corner, _Tony_ apologizing to him, and then the sudden shift of internal equilibrium as the jet took off. After that, everything was blank.

Those memories-- and the sight of SHIELD Medical’s unsecured ceiling, of his wrists laying in bed next to him, cuff-free, of Kate and America cuddled into a chair too small to hold them both, drained, but alive and smiling and also cuff-free-- were enough to complete the puzzle in his mind.

No indeed, he didn’t need drugs to feel this high.

“Holy shit, did we actually pull it off?” he said, wrenching his body around to look at Nat again. She ducked her head and chuckled behind the curtain of her hair. There might have been a sniffle mixed in there somewhere, he wasn’t sure.

“Hell yeah we did,” America said, pride making her voice thick. “Too well. We’ve been, um, invited to hang out at Avengers Tower for a while.”

“Invited, or invited invited? Or, like, _invited_ invited?” Clint asked, trying to parse the unease that had crept in at the end. 

“I felt it would be wiser for Kate to stay with us, than attempt to go back to Gansett at the moment,” Natasha said gently, “just… until matters with her father are cleared up. Skye as well. But they’re free to go elsewhere if they want-- not that I think we could _stop_ them.”

Clint had to agree with that assessment. If he’d learned one thing on the day it was that America was never anywhere she didn’t particularly want to be. At the moment, she wanted to be with Kate, and apparently Kate was willing to camp with a bunch of superheros for a while. He couldn’t say he blamed her; if one place was safe from Derek Bishop, it was the Tower.

 _Didn’t work so well for Phil,_ Clint’s traitorous mind reminded him. 

He _did_ sit up straight at that thought, IV and all his myriad bruises be damned.

“Where’re Phil and Skye?” he asked.

“Medical and debriefing still,” Natasha told him. “Tony’s sitting with Skye,” she continued, before Clint could do more than make a token noise of protest. “As much for JARVIS’s sake as hers, I think.”

Which was his biggest worry about Skye settled-- she couldn’t be in safer hands than Tony’s at the moment. If he wanted her around and free, nothing SHIELD or the US Government could do would stop him. So long as JARVIS was still babbling on about his failures, Tony was going to want Skye around. A nice symbiotic relationship. Clint feared for the fate of the free world, but that was a minor concern in comparison. 

With that settled, Clint could finally turn his concern towards the _urgent_ matter, the one he’d been putting off because once he started to think about it, he knew he wasn’t going to have a neuron left for anything else.

“I want to see Phil,” he said. 

“He’s not awake yet, I asked,” Steve said, and Clint swung his head towards the door. “Figured you’d want to know.” He’d come up almost unnaturally quietly, for him at any rate, and was hovering in the doorway looking awkward. “Fury’s sitting with him now. Agent May was in there for a while.”

Which didn’t sound like Steve had just _asked_ , it sounded like he’d been trying to visit, and Clint turned his head away so Steve couldn’t see the smile break through. It didn’t seem like a good idea, what with the way Steve’s nostrils were twitching like his face couldn’t decide whether to settle into frustration or worry. It only made it harder not to laugh, even while he was _not_ looking forward to the discussion to come.

“Sorry,” he said while he could still muffle his face in the pillow. _Best just get started now._

“‘Sorry.’” Steve repeated, and Clint heard the shuffle as he came into the room, closing the door behind him. “For _what_? Last I heard from Sam, JARVIS doesn’t think any of this was your fault. Blake played us all. So-- what are you sorry for? Looks like it all came up roses, even if…” Steve sighed hard, and Clint rolled back over. His head was down and he was vibrating. “Even if you didn’t trust your friends, nearly got a lot of people killed, brought _kids_ into it, and… and… other vulnerable people.”

Clint heard Kate protest at the “kids,” and deliberately didn’t look back at her-- or at Natasha and the others.

“You expect me to be sorry for jumping out of the Tower to avoid SHIELD, Cap?” he asked instead, and tried not to wince at the look on Steve’s face. _Should put that damned expression up on a statue on the Mall in DC. No-one’d ever so much as jaywalk again._ “‘Cause last I heard, you didn’t actually patent that move when you did it at the Triskelion.”

“Damnit, Clint, that. _That._ I can’t make you trust us, but forgive me if I thought we deserved a little more than that. We’re not SHIELD. We’d have protected you, you have to have known that. Or did you think it could be one of us?”

“Jeez, Nat, you didn’t explain?” The appeal to Natasha was more to get a read on her than anything else. She shrugged, and waved back to Steve. Clint sighed. “I knew damn well it wasn’t one of you, Steve, not intentionally. And you’d have protected me to hell and back, but what cost? Splitting the Avengers? Me disappearing to the Fridge before you knew what’d happened to me? I had five seconds to decide, maybe less. I decided to get the hell out and figure out what had happened from a safe distance. _Just like you did._ And, hell, I knew when I did it you’d never forgive me for it, and I’m sorry for _that_.”

“Which I could actually understand,” Steve replied, then darted a glance at Natasha himself. “Eventually. But when you decided to get help, you didn’t go to Nat, you didn’t go to us, you went to _civilians_?” 

Clint blinked, because he’d been away from the Tower longer than he thought, if Natasha was no longer trying to keep everybody else from calling her ‘Nat.’ 

“So you’d have preferred I stay solo?” Clint shot back. “Nearly got myself killed doing that. These guys,” he jabbed a thumb at Kate and America, “and Skye and Phil… and Doc…”

“And Tom,” Kate put in,

“And Tom,” Clint amended.

“And Wanda,” America reminded them both. _And the entirety of Gansett Light, to varying degrees. What, was I trying to crowd-source the danger or something?_

“And Wanda,” he sighed. “If I owe anyone an apology for that, it’s them.”

“Yeah well you can stuff it,” Kate muttered. “We’re responsible adults.”

 _This is not the way I expected this to go,_ Clint thought, watching her go mutinous. _This is not at all the way I thought this would go._

He’d been feeling genuinely penitent toward Steve-- and Tony and Bruce and the rest-- only to have it all disappear in a blaze of anger once Steve got on his high horse about Clint’s accidental alliances.

_This must be what Tony feels like half the time._

And _that_ led to another thought, one that pretty well dissolved all Clint’s remaining anger in a flood of laughter that startled all his visitors.

“What?” Steve asked, and Natasha eyed him suspiciously.

“Oh,” Clint sighed, “nothing. Just… now I know why chickens get named in anger.” 

“You-- what?”

“Just,” Clint waved his hand, still squeaking, “just remember when you and Phil had that little tiff about Creel? He was so mad he told me to name a chicken ‘Steve,’ just to get back at you.”

“He told you about that? Why a chicken-- and you did it?” Steve leaned back against the wall, obviously fighting bewildered laughter. 

“Hell, I named all of ‘em Steve. All the ones that weren’t named already. Phil _never_ named chickens. I only got one shot.”

There was a long silence, Steve with his eyes closed and his head tilted back, looking stupidly young for a moment in his shrinky-dink shirt and dark jacket. 

“Missed me, did you?” he asked.

Clint snorted.

“Don’t let it go to your head, Cap. You weren’t the _only_ chicken namesake, and anyway, Nat was the first.” He pretended he hadn’t seen Natasha stick out her tongue at Steve. Anything for a quiet life. “Maybe it wasn’t so much about you as the fact that I just missed Phil.”

The sense of loneliness hit him suddenly as if the bottom had dropped out of the barometer. 

He was tired, still, despite his so recent unconsciousness. Exhausted, injured, and already growing itchy in the confines of his hospital room. He needed Phil. Badly.

Phil, who’d know how to make it all go away, even without the external aid of things like fires and shandy and a large dog.

Phil, who’d made his own decision, and put his life and his livelihood, his chickens and his community, on the line for Clint. 

Phil, who was somewhere in the damned medical wing being attended only by Nick Fury, who might have once been Marcus Johnson his friend, but who’d just discovered he’d been lied to by more than one of his Agents. 

Phil, who Clint loved, despite the fact that he’d only known him a few scant handfuls of weeks.

Clint didn’t bother to inform anyone of what he was doing, he just sat up in bed and started to drop the rails.

 

**Two**

 

He was dreaming of North Bar. Swimming up through layers of clear water, light sparkling along the breakers, jellyfish scattering as his hips churned through the waves, clear little blobs with colored hearts slipping to and fro on the currents. Closer to his toes, tiny little fish, scales as brilliant as the feathers of chickens, darted in schools. Lucky waited for him on the shore, tongue lolling out and his fur gleaming like another sun. 

Clint waited for him on the shore, too, golden and happy as Lucky and just as naked, his grin as wide and one eye covered with a black eyepatch. 

This was how Phil knew he was dreaming; he’d never seen Clint on the shore in summer. He was also fairly certain that-- even in his drugged state-- he could enumerate every one of the injuries Clint had suffered in Quinn’s warehouse, and not a _one_ of them would have accounted for the eyepatch.

“Wake up, Coulson, you fucking faker,” Clint said, his face turning thunderous and dark. He stood up and began walking forward-- still, most unfortunately, naked.

Phil considered asking him to put some clothes on, as long as he was determined to turn into Nick Fury, but he didn’t think Clint would listen. 

Still, Lucky had an awful lot of fur; maybe he could share.

“Least you could do, Marcus. Fur suits you. Heh. Suits.”

His voice came out remarkably groggy, but he supposed that only made logical sense-- he was just waking up, after all.

“Okay, maybe not so faking. What the hell did they put you on?” 

Phil blinked his eyes open, against the crust that seemed to have accreted on them like dried brine. The light dimmed, turned more blue than gold, and as his vision cleared he saw Nick Fury looming over his bed, poking at the IV bag that hung from the silver pole next to it, and frowning at whatever he was reading.

“Where’s Clint?” 

Phil could have asked where Lucky had disappeared to, as well, he supposed, but Lucky was supposed to be back on North Bar watching chickens. Clint was another matter, and one that his hindbrain was insisting, even through the thick warm fog, was _urgent_.  
Fury frowned down at him, done with his inspection of the fluids currently being pumped through Phil’s veins.

“Yeah, you’re lucid enough to talk a little,” he decided, and sat with one of those overly-dramatic coat-clearing gestures he did.

“You look old,” Phil said, and it wasn’t untrue. Fury was drooping, gone ashen and dull and his eye nearly hidden in folds like a tortoise. The scars beneath his eyepatch stood out lividly, and even his fancy pirate coat seemed to slump around him.

“You made me old, Phil. You and Barton.”

“Where’s Clint?” Phil said again, feeling the urgency begin to make its way into his voice. It had been a simple question to answer-- or at least to say Fury wasn’t _going_ to answer. What could have happened?

“It’s not the conspiring against me thing, Phil, I’m used to that. It’s not Barton being a melodramatic dumbass, because I’m used to that too. _And_ to you trying to get yourself killed. But why’d you have to drag a bunch of kids into it?”

“Never conspired _against_ you. Just… around you… a little. Where’s Skye?” Phil asked, both for variety’s sake, and because that reminded him that he’d kind of become unconscious at an awkward time for Skye, not that _Phil’s_ word would have done her much good.

He hoped she’d gotten away before SHIELD could pick her up. 

He hoped she’d gotten _out_ before the Hulk had pulled all the catwalks down. Hell. Had he seen her since? Could he just not remember through all the cotton batting his head was stuffed with? 

Phil sat up--

Phil _tried_ to sit up.

The electronic protests of multiple monitoring devices, Fury’s hand on his chest, and the pounding in his own ears at the attempt stopped him, and Phil fell backwards. The pillows received him gracefully.

“Why’d you drag the kids into it, Phil?” Fury asked, and sat back. The sunlight through the blinds was making him squint, twisting his face up in what on another man, on a Marcus, might have been concern.

“Dragged themse’ves,” Phil said, because it was _true_ and because he resented the implication that he’d wittingly involved a parcel of teen girls in a dangerous plot. He’d just been trying to keep up with matters, really-- “‘sall Clint’s fault. ‘S hard for anyone to resist Clint.”

“I see _you_ didn’t,” Fury told him, and Phil snorted.

“Differn’t attractions.” Phil frowned, and realized he still had a pending question. “Where’s Clint?” It seemed like a simple enough question, unless Fury didn’t _know_ , and Phil hadn’t thought the situation was that bad. Although. “Izze dead? Marc… Marcus. Izze _dead_?” 

Phil couldn’t see _how_ , but without him around it was perfectly possible that things had gone even more to hell at the warehouse, and that Fury wasn’t ready to tell him yet.

“Of course not, Phil,” Fury snapped. “No one’s dead. Not even Felix. Not even-- unfortunately-- Ian Quinn.” He pulled a styrofoam cup off the bedside table next to Phil, glaring at it as if he could get it to give up all its secrets.

“Then where _izze_?” Phil pressed him. “Izze gone to the Tower? He can go back now right?” If there were any justice in the world, that should, at least, be it, that Clint could go back to the Tower, safely surrounded by Natasha in all her red-haloed glory, by the suitably penitent Stark and the pony-faced Captain America and the others. Back away from North Bar and the chickens, where he belonged.

 

“‘Pony-faced?’” Fury quoted, and Phil looked over at him. “Yeah, you said most of that out loud.” 

Phil tried to blank his mind-- or possibly the blush flashing through his cheeks. 

_Squeak_ , went something in the silence. 

Fury was half-mangling the styrofoam cup in his hands, playing with the straw, pulling it up and down through the plastic cap. Phil’d always thought the scrape of straw against styrofoam was one of the less pleasant background noises ever.

Well, he’d thought that since Orlat anyway. 

“‘Pony-faced,’” Fury repeated.

“Hey, take a good lookit that face an’ tell me I’m wrong. Izza pretty face, but. Equine. Where’s Clint?” Phil asked, because _he_ was gonna be the one repeating things here.

“Later,” Nick said, and set the cup down, so that he could lean forward, so close that Phil could have tweaked his nose-- had he had a death wish, and had his hand not been somewhat hampered by the IV in it. “I have some questions for you right now. A lot of what happens next is going to depend on how you answer them.”

“Well I have some questions back,” Phil huffed, trying to pretend it came out insistent and not petulant, “But you don’ seem interested in givin’ me answers.” He started to push himself upright again, more carefully this time, pressing his hands into the mattress and ignoring the way it moved the needle in his vein, sent pain flashing through his skin. “An’ I don’t suppose it matters, ‘since least you’ll do is kick me out, an’ moren’ likely you’re wondering if you c’n Fridge me. So, you know, I figure I’m fucked one way or another, but Marcus I’m not answering any more questions until you tell me _where the fuck Clint is._ ”

“Goddamnit Phil, I’m not gonna Fridge you--” Nick started, but since the sentence didn’t start with either Clint’s name or a location, Phil kinda buzzed it out with the rest of the humming in his ears. 

He pulled his legs free of the confining sheets, or tried to. 

“Find ‘m myse’f,” he grumbled, before nearly choking himself as he sat on the wrong part of his hospital gown before trying to move. 

“Phil, just lay back, for fuck’s sake, I promise I’ll--”

“No fucking promises, not from a guy who couldn’t bother to tell me he wasn’t dead. Gonna go find _Clint._ ” 

Assuming he wasn’t at the Tower, or in the Fridge already-- surely it was way too soon for that?-- and assuming, well… assuming he still _wanted_ Phil, which no… no that was silly, Clint might not stay, not now that he had his life and his friends back, but he wouldn’t go like _that_ , and if he was okay he’d be _here_ already, but if he wasn’t he wasn’t probably far…. Phil realized he might be babbling again, and looked up at Fury with the question in his eyes.

“Little bit,” Fury said, with a look on his face that Phil wasn’t either sober enough or stoned enough to parse. “And if you just _lie down_ , you sorry-ass motherfucker, I will go find you Clint.”

“Want Clint,” Phil said truculently, but began to allow himself to be manhandled back into bed. “Need to know.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Fury sighed, tugging the sheets up around Phil’s chest. “You two are more trouble than you’re worth.”

“Where. Is. Clint.” Phil told him, and poked him weakly in the chest.

“He’s--” Fury started, and then turned around, frowning, as the door banged open.

“Hey,” Clint said, from the doorway. 

He looked awful; a spectacularly ill-fitting hospital gown half-falling off his body, one shoulder swathed in bandages (and not really as neatly as Phil would have bandaged him, although Phil could admit now, in hindsight and with the benefit of the good drugs, that he’d maybe lingered a little-- a lot-- over his task at the time), bruises at odd intervals all over his body, and his arm _still_ swathed in saran wrap over another white bandage. His face was pale, the circles under his eyes were plum-colored, his hair and beard were wild, and he was grasping his own silver pole bedecked with crystal bags of IV fluid. A thin tube still snaked from bag to hand, even.

“You look good,” Phil sighed, taking in the sight before him and feeling something begin to subside in his chest, unfolding and opening into warmth.

“You look like shit,” Clint told him, on a grin. 

Phil laughed.

“Okay, okay, you’re both pathetic, we’ve established this, can you go back to bed now, Clint? He’s all right, you can see he’s all right, you can see him later. Just. Bed. Now. You haven’t had drugs yet and you’re about to fall over.” 

That was Kate Bishop, Phil knew that voice. It was Kate Bishop, somewhere behind Clint, and Phil was grateful, because if it were Steven Pony Face Rogers there with Clint instead, Phil wasn’t sure he’d quite survive. The last time Captain America had visited his bedside, he might have been faintly blue and possibly humming, but at least he had pants on.

“It’s all right, Ms Bishop, give him half a second. I’ll make sure he gets back to bed safely.” Steve Rogers said, and Phil sighed.

“Yeah, gimme half a second,” Clint parrotted, still looking at Phil, still grinning. “Good drugs?” he asked Phil, and Phil felt his smile widen.

“Good drugs,” he affirmed. “None for you?”

“Not yet,” Clint said. “Kinda feelin’ it. Gonna need ‘em soon. Nurses are gonna be mad at me for this.”

“Yeah,” Phil told him, “‘m glad though. You need to go back to bed.”

“You’re not wrong,” Clint said, and behind him, Kate yelped in protest.

“Touching as this is, Barton,” Fury drawled, and Phil snuck a look at him. His face was carefully blank, “we’re trying to have a conversation here.”

“I know.” Clint seemed truly contrite about it, too. “Don’t mean to interrupt. Just wanted to see Phil was okay. I’ll go to bed now.”

“Finally,” Kate grumbled.

“Okay,” Fury said, and then paused, because Clint was not retreating.

Oh no, he was coming closer, still trailing his IV stand, the wheels squeesqueeing across the floor as he shuffled, until he was standing right over Phil, beaming down at him, as filled with light as he’d been in Phil’s dream.

The bases of their IV stands tangled. Phil realized he was grinning so hard his face hurt, just staring up at Clint, afraid if he stopped staring Clint would disappear forever.

It took him a moment to register the poke, and another moment-- and another poke-- to look down and realize Clint was jabbing him in the midriff. 

Phil scooted away from the prodding before he knew what he was doing. 

“Hrmm,” Clint said, evidently quite pleased with himself. He pulled back Phil’s covers, and then pulled himself onto the bed. Phil made room for him, mostly bewildered, but figuring that having his back pressed up against the unsteady aluminum rail behind him was made up for by the warm rasp of Clint’s leg hair against his own as he nestled in. 

“Hey,” Phil said, and Clint smiled up at him, then lay down, curling into Phil as well as the complicating IV tubes would allow, tangling Phil’s calves with his own firm ones, and laying his head on gingerly on Phil’s good shoulder.

“You’re have got to be kidding me,” Kate said from the doorway, and Phil looked up to find that she and Steve Rogers had both crowded inside. She was dressed in a pair of the Black Widow’s sweats, he was in civvies, and they both looked frustratingly fresh given everything. 

Clint just purred. From the corner into which he’d retreated, Nick Fury rolled his eyes.

“Hi Phil,” said Natasha Romanov, as she shouldered her way through to come inside. She, at least, was smiling at him benignly-- it was nearly watery, it was so damp. “Good to see you awake.”

“Can I get back to my interrogation now?” Fury asked.

“Carry on,” Clint said grandly, the effect only partially muffled by Phil’s chest hair. And then he promptly went to sleep.

 

**Three**

 

The lights in the corridor had dimmed and the nurses come and gone, a bustling swarm rearranging sheets, changing out empty packs of fluid for fat clear new ones, shooting their concoctions into the drips, trundling in a new hospital bed and moving Clint into it, before leaving the two of them alone together again, fading in and out of narcotic-laced dreams.

Phil woke up to find himself still facing Clint’s bed, and watched as Clint opened his eyes too. In his still hazy state, he felt for a moment that their eyelids must be on a circuit, a blink from one leading to a corresponding blink from the other.

“Hmm,” Clint said, “that’s nice.”

“Not as nice as you over here,” Phil told him, “though I admit it was getting cramped.”

The drugs seemed to have mostly ebbed as he slept; his mind was no longer turgid and bottomless. Clint’s gaze was clear, too. Whatever he’d been given for his pain had been just enough to let him sleep.

Neither of them seemed inclined to move or speak, breaking the stillness of the night and the background hum of the hospital. Phil could have wished for stars, for the noise of the surf and the wind in the branches outside the porch, the creak of the cottage as it settled into the sandy soil, Lucky’s snuffling breath hot against his arm. 

He wondered if Clint felt the same loss, or if he was relieved to be back where machines beeped in the night and, outside, the city whispered its continued conversation even in the dead of the pre-dawn hours. Looking at him now, hooked up to fluid and tucked neatly into bed, Phil’s mind wandered back to bandaging him on the kitchen table, the way his lungs had rasped as he tried to hide his cough, the cold plop of an errant jellyfish. At least this time, he didn’t have to worry about getting Clint to agree to a doctor.

No, he just had to worry about _what happened next._ Clint had made his declaration of loyalties very clear earlier, by the weight of his body next to Phil’s in the hospital bed too small to hold them both. Whether that meant Clint was staying in his bed for _good_ , or whether he was just shielding Phil using his only current means, Phil wasn’t sure. Didn’t know if Clint was even sure. 

All he did know, in this strange quiet place between Tower and shore, was that everything they’d worked for they’d accomplished. There was nothing left for them to do, no ties holding them together except the ones they knotted themselves.

“Phil,” Marcus Johnson said from the doorway, and Phil put the Hawkeye Problem aside on a shelf in his mind for a while, and motioned him in. He _was_ Marcus at the moment, not Director Fury at all, that black coat shed leaving him in a worn old black commando sweater that Phil thought might actually have belonged to him back when he still had two eyes.  
“What time is it?” Phil asked, fumbling for the control to make his bed sit up.

“Too early,” Marcus said, “or maybe way too late. He awake?” he swung his chin at Clint.

“Awake and undrugged, Nick,” Clint said, and his bed started to tilt upwards as well, with a lack of stuttering that told Phil Clint was much practiced in the art and science of hospital beds.

“Clint,” Nick responded, and Phil watched them watch each other with a sort of familiar weariness. “Sorry to wake you both up.”

“You’re not,” Clint told him, and Phil decided just to let Clint lead. This was _his_ game now, after all, Phil had already played his part. “What’s up?”

“Nothing at the moment-- and this is the first moment I can say that about, since you two goddamn assholes blew up my day.” Nick looked over at the visitor’s chair he’d occupied earlier in the day, wandered over, and slumped into that. “I just got word from Agent Hand that they’ve taken the New Mexico facility. Had her and May out there so I had to debrief Stark and your Skye myself; it seemed safer for everyone, especially the kind of vocabulary Stark was deploying. They’ll be by in the morning.”

“Tony’s most pissed at himself,” Clint said quietly, “if it helps. You-- and SHIELD in general-- come in probably third down the line, after me.”

Nick rubbed his face, fingers edging up under his eyepatch. Phil’d seen Marcus Johnson do it a few times, back when he still had both eyes, late at night with just the two of them stuck in some foxhole or half-blasted barn. 

“Stark can--” Nick stopped. “Never mind Stark. We’ll handle Stark. If I hadn’t been so damned blind about Felix this wouldn’t have-- you’re not SHIELD anymore, Clint. You don’t owe me anything. If you see a big bouquet show up, next couple days? Says ‘thanks for jumping out a window, asshole’? It wasn’t from me, and you’ll never prove otherwise. But I’m glad you remembered _one_ thing I taught you anyway.”

Clint snorted, and rolled his eyes. 

“It would have been damning?” Phil said quietly, when neither of them seemed in the mood for speaking. Nick nodded. 

“I wouldn’t have had a choice but to send him to the ‘Fridge. And I’m sure that was the point. Wouldn’t have found all this shit in time, either. That said, you damned idiot,” he glared at Clint, all the more effective in the low light that dimmed every part of him but eye and teeth into the shadows, “I’m not sure what the fuck I owe you for dragging Cheese into this.”

“Cheese dragged Cheese into this.” Perhaps it came out more harshly than Phil had expected it to, but he was damned if he let Clint take the blame for _that_. “Marcus--”

“Naw,” Nick cut him off, turning the glare on him. “Spare me the speech. Only question I got for you is were you serious?”

“Was I--” Phil stopped, thinking about it. 

_Were you serious_? About what? 

The answer presented itself immediately: about _everything_. About standing on top of a penthouse in Manhattan and telling Nick Fury he would take care of the Avengers for him. About telling the Avengers-- and Hand-- that he’d realized he’d been wasting his life.

He thought of North Bar, wrapped in darkness, the chickens huddled in their straw, Lucky… hopefully taken home with Doc Halliday until he could be retrieved, the quiet dance of stars on waves. How much he’d _missed_ them. And then he looked over and saw Clint, watching him with grave eyes, already losing some of the purple circle beneath them. 

“I would never knowingly injure something of yours, Marcus, not friend and not agency,” he said, rolling it around in his mind as he said it. _That, at least, I know is true._ And… “I’ll take the consequences.”

“Good,” Marcus said, and bent his head, raking his palms over it. Clint sat straight up, elbows going to his knees.

“Nick?” he asked, “what the hell is this?” His voice came out rough. Phil had to admit his own lungs had stopped working. He’d rarely seen Marcus this way-- not even after Orlat. Not flat-out _ashamed._

“Before anything else, Phil-- and Clint-- let me remind you how easily I trust."

Clint snorted in a way that made Phil figure Marcus was still using the fingers of one hand speech.

"There was a project, we called it TAHITI. It was meant not to save lives, it was meant to do more. Bring people _back_ to life. I’m not gonna tell you the mechanics, just know it was the freakiest thing I ever signed my name to. And I trusted it to Felix Blake, just like I’d trusted him with the Avengers, and before that with Clint and Natasha. Because I knew he’d deliver.” He looked up, and his one eye was desolate. “And he did.”

He described it in detail for them, in the darkened room at the tail end of the night, the hospital so still it could have been on the moon. The volunteers for whom the treatment was a last, desperate hope. The many for whom hope turned to dust-- or madness. Blake’s reports on the progress, so discouraging for so long, finally ending with ‘we can control the madness through a memory wipe. Sir, it’s not pretty, we can’t return agents to the field, not now. We’re close, though. We have to be. We’ve gone so far now, it would be a desecration if this were all a waste. My recommendation is to watch our current crop of returnees, study our results so far, and design a new set of trials. In the meantime, use as a last resort. Only. I mean it, Nick.’

“... God help us both,” Nick finished, “I took him at his word.”

“Jesus, Marcus,” Phil breathed out after a moment, pulling his sheet up over his chest more to warm himself against the chill in his heart than anything else. Clint was frozen, he could tell even out of the corner of his eye, probably with good reason. _As a last resort._ What would that have been, besides the fall of an Avenger?

Nick was staring up at the ceiling; the first time Phil could remember where he refused to meet someone’s eyes. 

“Look what I did to him,” Nick rasped, after a while. “I needed him back; you know why as well as I do. Needed my sure hand, my corner pocket, after the WSC nearly nuked Manhattan.”

“You kept him quarantined,” Clint took over, his voice tight. “The Globemaster. Bobbi Morse to… what? Watch him? As well as be his XO?” 

Phil was glad to see he’d managed to recover enough to speak, anyway, his arms wrapped around his knees. He briefly contemplated scooting over to grab Clint’s hand, or just climbing in himself.

“The whole team, really.” The shrug Nick gave was tighter, closer to his normal contained self. “May put together a docket, acceptable candidates. He picked them, but she made sure all the choices were ones we needed in case anything went wrong. I asked her to take Morse’s spot herself but she told me it’d be too personal for her. Whether she’d have noticed-- I don’t know.”

“When did Felix start to… go off?”

It wasn’t that Phil wanted to know the answer. He _didn’t_. Didn’t want to know if there’d been a time they could have saved Felix, if it had been noticed. Didn’t want to know how much of his work with Quinn had been _him_ and not the madness.

“Well, that brings me to why I’m here tonight,” Nick sighed, and he stood up to look down at them both. “And why I need your help.” 

It was one of those looks that Phil still occasionally saw in nightmares, the ones that started out all peaches and cake and ended up in a mess of exploded triple creme. He sighed.

“Lay it on us,” he said.

\----

Skye came with the morning light.

Clint didn’t think she’d gotten much sleep, but he also didn’t care, as she _had_ gotten coffee and two sacks sleek with promising quantities of grease. 

“Heya, boss’n’boss,” she said as she came through the door, “just like old times, huh?” Like Kate and America the previous day, she was wearing black yoga pants, with her plaid shirt thrown over a black tank, and Clint wondered if Natasha’d started a cult. It wasn’t subtle, anyway.

“Just like old times,” he said, sitting up and smiling. Phil pulled himself out of the visitor’s chair he’d dropped into-- totally _not_ just to rest a minute-- when he’d come out of the bathroom, already grinning back at her.

It took Phil a single stride to cross the room and gather her up in a hug, her arms held wide to keep the bags from soiling his fine shirt. She squawked awkwardly in his arms for the moment before he let her go. He took the coffee with him, smiling his secret little smile down into the black plastic lid and letting his breath haze it. 

Clint beat back the tide of fondness welling up in him by grabbing the other cup of coffee and swallowing. He didn’t bother to detach it from Skye’s hand as he did, so she was drawn with. She used it as an excuse to hug him too, a warm, impulsive press, before she fell back and left them their breakfasts.

“She insisted she needed those before she could debrief,” Tony Stark said, and sidled in. “You never give me a hug, Coulson.”

“C’mere,” Phil said, opening his arms, and Tony backpedaled. 

“And you’re still high. That could be a problem. You know that could be a problem, right? We’re supposed to debrief you before… anyway, you’ve got breakfast and you’ve got Skye, anything you need from me?”

“Yeah,” Skye said, from her perch at Clint’s feet, “you’re part of this mess too. Come. Sit. D’you want to start or should I?” She was practically sitting on his toes, but Clint’s couldn’t bring himself to care. 

His nerves were already in a fine frantic state; had been since Phil’d gone into the bathroom to pull on the suit that Agent Triplett had delivered earlier. He himself had finally managed to ditch the hospital gown for his _own_ set of SHIELD-issue sweats-- possibly the same ones he’d left in a locker when he’d walked out the last time, even. Between the clothing and the sandwich (it wasn’t an Outrageous Egg special, sadly, but it was passable) and Skye knocking her legs against his bed, he felt something settle in him. Little pieces of familiarity filling up the blank canvas of the hospital room, drawing him back in. 

Phil was certainly not actually high, not given where he was headed, but Clint could see why Tony would think so. He was looking practically giddy to have Skye with them. Clint would have had his toes squashed a thousand times over just to bring that twinkle back to his eye. 

“I--” Stark said, watching them all settle in, then he paused and started up again in a different tone. “Sorry, it’s… okay, this is just weird. The three of you, doing this… this breakfast thing. And Coulson smiling. I didn’t know you smiled. That’s… I’m not sure that’s not worse than everything else you didn’t tell us.” 

“I think you better start,” Clint said, turning to Skye and ignoring both his own blush, starting to sneak past his collar, and the desire to grab Phil and growl at Tony, “or we may never get going.”

“No, I’m-- I’m fine.” Tony protested. “I just don’t want to talk about this, but I’ve got to talk about this, so let’s just go ahead and JARVIS.”

“JARVIS?” Phil asked, finishing his sandwich and crumpling the wrapper carefully, then deliberately licking a lingering drop of sausage juice off his finger. 

_And I may not survive him doing that in public, my god._

“Remember what JARVIS said?” Skye asked, leaning forward so she could look at Clint. “When we were at the Tower. He said he’d failed, then he asked us to confirm that Blake wasn’t just a… well a digital ghost?”

“Yeah?” Clint told her, then looked up at Tony. “Is that it? Blake somehow had him thinking he was just a… what, a ghost in the shell? A glitch in the system?”

“Let’s not get too Technomancer, Barton,” Tony grumbled. 

As it turned out, however, that _was_ it. Sometime after his death, Blake had exploited his previous security access at the Tower, never purged, to override JARVIS’s security by making him parse any bit of data with Blake’s face on it as if it had all been time-stamped incorrectly. JARVIS shuffled any detail, voiceprint, visual feed, even file, off into the past, based on the logic that Blake had ceased to exist at the time of the Battle of New York. In effect, the coding time-shifted him right out of existence. Any surrounding data got time-displaced as well, appearing to belong at a time when Blake _had_ been alive and _had_ roamed the half-finished Tower. 

Worst of all, it was unlikely to be Blake’s own work-- he was certainly not that kind of coder-- meaning he had either used Quinn’s people, or corrupted or fooled someone on his own team into doing it.

It had been brilliant, Skye and Tony both thought so, and both seemed to feel as sick as Clint did at the thought of JARVIS, seeing shadows at the corners of his analysis. Phil had gone still, as he had last night when Nick had mentioned Blake and TAHITI. 

“The data from my laptop, though, never pointed directly to Felix Blake,” Skye told them both, “it pointed to one Agent Felix Hollis, or members of his team, signing in by voiceprint or bioscan wherever your login, Clint, eventually pops up physically. Yeah, no, seriously, Fury just used the guy’s old name to keep his survival classified. When it wasn’t Hollis, it was Ward… or Bobbi Morse. JARVIS says we can trace some of the digital leaks that way too. So, y’know, JARVIS caught that, and then he caught where I’d linked Hollis to Blake. And that confused the fuck out of him, so… he asked.”

“It’s _fixed_ now,” Tony growled, still acting like his baby had been violated-- which was not fucking far from the truth, Clint reflected. “JARVIS can purge his own viruses once he knows where they are. But that’s,” he opened his hands, and finally met Clint’s eyes again. “It’ll never happen again.”

“Is that what allowed the listening device I wore to get past JARVIS’s scanners?” Phil asked. He was in the process of finishing a half-windsor, looking stiffer than Clint would have liked to see him, like his chest was one big bruise beneath the cotton-- which it probably was. Clint hadn’t had a chance to check yet.

“Not sure,” Tony said, “that’s next. But I bet so. It’d be valuable as a trade to Quinn, giving him access to SHIELD and Stark tech and security procedures so he could engineer counter surveillance. Market for that wouldn’t be small. So anyway,” he turned to stand up and began to move to the door. Stopped, rapped his hand on the doorsill. “So anyway I’m just gonna go have a really stiff… uh, think… and figure out how to break all this to Pepper. She was… she liked him. I… fuck. Worst part though isn’t me getting fucked over, it’s me fucking my friends over with this.”

Phil stopped with his tie in midair, and stared at him, blinking. Skye, like a lesser Coulson, paused with her coffee in nearly the exact same position.

“I don’t think Nat’s gonna blame you, except maybe for thinking she was sleeping with Phil,” Clint said carefully. “You’re gonna have to grovel a bit about that one.”

“Damnit, Barton, can’t you take an apology?” Tony snarled, rounding on him. “I’m not really good at them, they always end up strawberries or twelve foot tall rabbits, and I’m trying to avoid all that because Pepper says it’s kind of excessive, so just… shut up and stop being _you_ and let me be mad at myself, okay? I’m the one who said I thought you’d done it. I thought I had everything-- I hoped I _didn’t_ , but--”

“Tony,” Clint cut him off, because if he had to go through this whole self-flagellation thing Tony was working up to, he was going to lose it. They had bigger things to worry about, this morning. “Don’t be a fucking idiot. I’m not gonna blame you for believing the evidence, okay? Hell, after HYDRA, after everything you found there, could you afford not to? _I_ know where it all pointed, and I know how fucking airtight it all seemed, I mean we spent long enough chasing it down. Don’t you dare feel bad for trying to protect the Avengers.”

“If I’d been going to protect the Avengers, Clint, I’d have believed in you,” Tony told him, practically cutting off Clint’s final words in his eagerness to talk. “I mean, you? Work with Ian Quinn? What was I _on_?”

“Eh,” Clint said, and waved it away with his free hand. He was aware of Skye nodding along eagerly to Tony’s self-description, and if he didn’t stop this soon he was sure she was gonna bust out with an _amen_. “You followed the evidence. I’m the one who jumped out of a Tower, so let’s admit here that maybe looked a little bad, to the uninitiated.”

After a long, long moment, where Clint was afraid Tony’s eyes were going to bug right out of his head and roll on the floor, his shoulders began to shake. The internal earthquake travelled through his body and finally emerged as laughter.

“Only you, Barton,” he half managed, pointing a finger, “only you could try and--” he stopped, and shook his head. “Thank you for coming back, you jerk.”

Phil had been watching Tony almost casually as he straightened his tie. He stood as Tony finished talking, turning to the doorway. Nick Fury was standing there, back in his black nehru suit with his eyepatch gleaming, devoid of all warmth.

“If you’re all done playing Days of Our Lives in here,” he said, “I need Phil. He’s got a date.”

“Yeah,” Phil sighed, looking so blank and old that Clint bit back the urge to swing out of bed and kiss him breathless. “Yeah, let’s go.”

 

**Four**

 

“Oh God, really? That’s hilarious,” Felix Blake said, looking up.

Phil smiled, looked once at the empty chair across the powder black table from him, and stepped to the side. He put his hands in his pant pockets instead and slumped a little, clearly going nowhere fast. He wasn’t hovering precisely, and certainly not looming. Loitering with intent, if anything.

From behind the one-way glass, Clint watched him. Nick Fury stood by his side, and for a moment each of them were framed in the hexagonal latticework that made up the walls of the interrogation chamber. Felix and Phil, on the other side of the glass, looked like they were caught in a beehive. Natasha knew from past experience that the other side of the glass was visually no different than the rest of the wall it was mounted on so that its occupants couldn’t tell which side any observation would come from.

Of course, odds were even that Felix remembered this room and knew exactly where his watchers were.

“You sure this was a good idea?” Clint asked, fidgeting with his arms a little, hands on hips, then down, then arms crossed-- likely trying to find an angle that wouldn’t chafe his wounds. 

“Nah, but it was better than nothing,” Nick Fury said, crossing his own arms and staring fixedly into the interrogation room, where Phil and Felix were exchanging greetings as wary as two cats on a single picket fence. 

“He wasn’t giving May anything, he wasn’t giving Natasha anything, and I get the feeling we’re running out of time now before it’s too late. Felix’s brain’s like an overripe banana-- notice one fruit fly one day and doesn’t seem big, but next day the damn thing stinks to high heaven and it’s covered in pests.”

“It’s not that bad,” Natasha put in, for whose comfort exactly she wasn’t sure. “I am certain he was playing up the insanity factor when I questioned him. Or perhaps letting himself go. For Phil, however….” she trailed off.

Her eyes rested on Nick but she touched her fingers to Clint’s back for a moment. 

“For Cheese, however, Holly will want to appear at his best,” Clint muttered, as if he couldn’t help completing the thought. “Like some kind of messed up class reunion.”

Nick shot him a quick glance, though Clint didn’t appear to notice it. Natasha stepped forward, slipping in between them and letting her fingers trace Clint’s shoulderblade for the space of a moment. They slipped some under her touch.

When she looked up, Nick was half watching her, and she was grateful that she’d talked Tony and Steve out of insisting they be allowed in the room. She wouldn’t have wanted them to see him with his skin so thin.

“... hear you talked to Melinda and Nat already,” Phil was saying when she turned her attention back to the scene being played out for them, “or rather didn’t talk. Apparently someone thinks I’ll have an open and trustworthy demeanor.” 

Felix bristled.

“I said everything I needed to Na _tash_ a on the Quinjet. And if Fury really thinks I’ll just lay everything out for you because we used to fuck, Phil, he’s got another goddamn think coming.”

“Well, this is already more than I got,” Natasha muttered, trying to ignore the way her own proper name suddenly sounded like nails on a chalkboard to her-- as well as the twinge of jealousy that all _Coulson_ had to do to get _her_ ex-SO to talk was walk into the room and be all smooth and competent.

And that the first time he’d used her nickname without prior permission was as an interrogation technique.

She must not have hidden it well enough-- Clint tucked his elbow through hers, squeezing gently. Or perhaps he was feeling uncomfortable for other reasons. The only time they’d seen this view before, it had been when busting Blake _out_ of interrogation chambers. That his lover was the one interrogating Blake must make the sand shifting beneath his feet seem even more treacherous. 

“I’m not that interested in what Marcus wants,” Phil said, pulling out the chair with a scrape that echoed through the audio feed, “because honestly we can get most of that from Ian Quinn much more easily. He’s _not_ trained to resist interrogations, after all. We picked up some of your other co-conspirators as well last night and this morning. Raina, for instance.” He sat down. 

Natasha heard a tiny grunt of satisfaction from Nick; he’d slept no more than she had the past night, trying to sort through the tangled mess-- metaphorical and actual-- left by the explosion of the warehouse in Barnegat Bay. Agent Morse had been the one to lead the raid on the Cybertek compound in New Mexico, and had by all accounts taken out her feelings on being played in righteous asskicking. The woman Raina that Phil had just namedropped had been at the facility, leading Project Centipede. 

They had apparently been far enough along that Quinn had booked tours for several high-ranking Pentagon officials for two weeks out.

Natasha was very glad she could leave the handling of _that_ to Director Fury. _If we ever break with SHIELD, that sort of thing will be our problem. Hell and death, let Fury come out of this all intact._

“My _co-conspirators_.” The word rolled of Felix’s tongue like he was judging it by mouthfeel, and he gave Phil a sardonic sort of grin. “That’s an interesting word choice.”

“You object?” Phil leaned forward, to all appearances engaged and at ease.

“It’s telling. That’s the play, isn’t it? I’m going to be buried as if this were all just another sordid power grab? Anything to keep SHIELD lily white, I suppose, even though by now anyone should be able to see through _that_ dodge.” Felix leaned back in his chair, the better, apparently, to heap scorn on Phil, and the chains at his wrists creaked. “Yes, fine, see if you can get the girl to talk; on your heads be it. 

“She has her own agenda-- well, we all did. No loyal soldiers here except the ones Cybertek fucked over with eye implants. Quinn, Cybertek, Project Centipede-- those were all designed to corner the market on private world security. Had to work fast, I suppose, what with everyone in the horse race. So they’d steal a little from the ruins of AIM, steal a little more from the projects that came to light when Hydra happened-- I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, so you can wipe that damned smirk off your face.”

Phil did, temporarily. It slipped back as if his lips hadn’t been laid flat to dry and had curled up at the edges. Natasha found the smile start to appear on her own face instead.

“You’re right, we know all that. We know that you didn’t start out on their side either, Felix. You weren’t interested in cornering the market on super-soldiers as late as Malta, when you kidnapped Hall back out from under Quinn-- or rather, kidnapped the blob of gravitonium he was trapped in. Near as anyone can tell in retrospect, you were still a loyal SHIELD operative even after that. Until, that is, you decided that saving the universe involved taking SHIELD and the Avengers out. So when did you get the idea to use the Index-- which you were tasked with _maintaining_ \-- against us? Before or after the Triskelion fell?”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Nick growled, suddenly sharp. “Did he-- he did, didn’t he? Jesus, good catch, Cheese.”

Natasha dropped Clint’s arm, going tense as a pointer. 

_Daniels. Creel. The kid with the blizzard--_

“It would make sense,” she muttered. “We were beginning to think it was Hydra who’d managed to get them all out of the Fridge….” 

“Not telling, Cheese,” Felix said. It was practically sing-song and just the bright side of sane. “But I’m glad you noticed. And why not? Plenty of people with a grudge against SHIELD, plenty of power to exploit. And I already had access to all the data.”

“And you’re good at using it to make other people think it’s their idea to do what you want. I do remember. Got too clever though; Hall turned it back on you,” Phil said quietly, leaning forward on his elbows. “That had to hurt. And after you unleashed him the first time, too. Had to be hard, getting him put back together and safely hidden after the Avengers defeated him. That _was_ the shipping container you’d hidden him in, wasn’t it, that he threw?”

“He was ungrateful,” Felix admitted, “and a double-crosser in the end, but he came closest to understanding just how _dangerous_ it was to leave these things in your hands or Quinn’s. The more I found out, the more I saw the patterns, the more I knew. You’re not fit to control the people that are coming. _Look_ at the Index. Yes, I did Fury’s work, caretaking, pruning, weeding, but they were never really under our control. And they’re not a half, not a quarter, of what’s hiding so deep. So deep. Waiting to wake up.”

“Waiting for you to wake them up?” In the stillness, Phil’s voice came like footfalls outside a door.

“I…” This seemed to pose Felix a problem. 

He struggled for words a moment, his hands moving in restless patterns over the table, round and round then trailing off. When one skipped off the edge, he glared at it. 

“I hadn’t gotten that far,” he admitted. “But I _would_ have. Found out who, what-- it’s not easy, deciphering the key to the universe.” His smile was rueful, charming. Entirely like the old Felix Blake except rotten underneath.

“I imagine,” Phil agreed.

“You _can’t_ imagine.” Felix stood upright so fast he nearly yanked the table up, his arms going straight, strained as they reached the end of their ability to tug. “You don’t know what it was like. God, Quinn didn’t know either. Raina… she knew. I think she knew before I did. Got me into the machine, eventually, the one that cracked my memories. And I began to see, and to see what Fury was keeping from me. Grant--” his voice broke.

“Grant Ward. He was John Garrett’s protege, wasn’t he?” 

Phil was clearly still playing at this being any normal conversation between any two random people who hadn’t fucked each other or tried to kill each other at all. Natasha had to admit she was impressed. 

From the tension in every line of Clint, standing sentinel next to her still, she didn’t think _impressed_ was quite the word he would have used. He looked like he was torn between throwing up and throwing himself at Phil, wall or no wall.

“Garrett never knew what he had,” Felix spat. “Grant was lost without him. He’s the one who told me Morse was watching me, reporting back to Fury. The one who supported me when I was desperate for answers. And the more answers I got, the more I needed, until finally they made me remember the needles in my brain, the test subjects and reports. And then, well, then my mind began to open, of course.”

“And that led you to put yourself in the power of Ian Quinn, and this Raina… and the remnants of a project that Garrett, on behalf of Hydra, had been abetting. One that needed a new senior agent from SHIELD."

“I was never in anyone’s power but my own. And Garrett was acting on behalf of his own damn self,” Felix grumbled, warmed to his topic now. “He and Hydra had an understanding, but none of the others knew about it. They only knew him as the Clairvoyant, that overly-dramatic asshole. I _never_ liked that man, you know. He was bad for Clint. At least Nick and I recognized it and got Clint away from Garrett before he ruined him, huh? Too damn late for Grant, but he was getting better. He _was_.”

“Is that why you protected Ward during the Hydra uprising? Or did you not find out until after? You guessed, didn’t you? I assume he wouldn’t trust you with something like that on his own.”

“He wasn’t Hydra out of anything but loyalty to Garrett,” Felix said, slamming his head back, eyes closed hard. “Of course I protected him. He learned to trust me.”

“And he, in turn, made you into a replacement for Garrett.” Phil’s voice was persistent as a little river, wearing away its banks, slowly crumbling the steady ground beneath Felix. “Got you to finish Garrett’s work. Which might or might not have been Hydra’s.”

Felix’s face was all the answer necessary, the way it crumpled inwards. 

“Oh _motherfuck_ ,” Nick said again, leaning forward to watch Phil, as Phil watched Felix with a phantom trace of compassion in his eyes. “If you let that slippery, brainy bastard get away, Barton, I will come after you myself.” 

“Not planning on it,” Clint rasped. 

The snort Natasha gave was hardly ladylike, and probably not appreciated, but she couldn’t help it. She’d thought of toes. 

“I knew what he was doing,” Felix said, “and I used it for my own ends. We used each other, let’s say. But I was always the one giving orders. I knew I needed answers, and I knew Nick Fury was trying desperately to make sure I didn’t get them.”

“And by the time you realized Marcus was doing it on your own recommendation? Too late to repair the damage?” Phil shook his head, leaning forward again, nearly close enough to close one hand over Felix’s. “Holly, you worked with him for fifteen years or more, one way or another. You were loyal to SHIELD, everyone knows that. Lived and breathed it. Strike Team Delta, the Avengers-- they were nothing without you. You sacrificed your _life_ in New York. Clint nearly broke down telling me about that. It was your _home._ ”

They held position for a long moment, Phil curved until he almost hovered over Felix, as if he was trying to make himself a shield.

His voice was very, very soft when he spoke again.

“And yet… you threw it away. You followed Grant Ward and Ian Quinn and a girl in a flower dress down the rabbit hole, instead of trusting Fury-- or confronting Bobbi Morse.”

“You’re not all SHIELD yet, Phil, if you think they’d ever have given me a straight answer. By then I knew I wasn’t worth that much to them.” 

In all the years she’d known him, Natasha’d never seen Felix Blake so flat-out miserable.

Back behind his side of the one-way glass, Nick dropped his head. 

The movement drew her attention to him, the exhaustion graying out his dark face. He reminded her in that moment of the first time she’d seen him alive, in their hideout under the dam, when hope and injured pride had nearly torn her heart apart between them. 

That had been just before they’d taken down the Triskelion, just _after_ she and Steve had found the computerized echo of Arnim Zola and learned that their organization had been cannibalized from within. Director Fury had made the call that the world was more important than the health of one of her organs, when he’d let her and Steve-- and the entire civilized world-- think he was dead. When only Maria and Clint had been accompanying him as he recovered. 

But he hadn’t held out forever, he’d pulled them back into his circle as soon as he could and dealt with the consequences of his deception. Nick Fury reacted quickly and comprehensively to the changing nature of possibility; if his first rule had been “one man can accomplish anything once he realizes he’s part of something bigger,” his second was “pay attention Agent, do you want to get killed?!”

She liked to _think_ Nick would have known it was time to reconsider, if Felix had asked him, to weigh the risks anew. She wished she could be sure.

_And if he had-- once Felix had the memories back, would it have turned out the same way? Or would Bobbi and the others watching him have been able to prevent it?_

Too late to know now, at any rate. Any forks in that road were long past, and Felix had always made the choices that allowed him to keep his counsel to himself, had always preferred to be the only one with all the facts.

He was far too like her, that way. It came naturally to her-- or it came because of the Red Room, it was hard to be sure. Whichever, it was too deep a part of her to easily break. Clint had come to it the other way, made wary by circumstance and hating it. He’d opened so quickly with Phil, it was frightening.

Which brought her wandering thoughts back to the man running the interrogation in the next room. 

Natasha concentrated on Phil. He was still doing an admirable job pretending to be unaffected, but she didn’t think he was fooling any of them, not his ex lover, not his ex best friend-- and clearly not his new lover, whose hands were fisted tightly as he watched. Phil was rattled. It was going way too close to the bone.

“I think Marcus has always been good at reevaluating on the fly,” Phil said finally. “We none of us have the high ground here, Holly.”

“‘We,’ Felix said, looking back up. “You keep saying that. What _is_ this… _we_ , Cheese? How long had you and Marcus been plotting to replace me? You and Clint? How long ago did you steal them-- was it after I died? It must have been. Must have. I wouldn’t have missed that earlier. If I’d known--”

“Excuse me,” Clint said, and he walked out of the room.

**Five**

The door to the interrogation room opened with a polite little snick and whish of air, and Clint stepped in, smiling apologetically at Phil as he did. 

_Oh, my heart,_ Phil thought, watching Clint come, his smile sliding off as he turned to Holly, becoming something more somber, like the change of wind just before a storm. The air felt fresher as he passed, fifteen years beginning to dissipate like the ghosts they were.

Clint had made no effort to change out of the SHIELD-issue tee and pants he’d been wearing that morning, rucked up a little around the bulky bandage on his bicep. It occurred to Phil that Holly had probably seen Clint this way far oftener than Phil had been able to-- at least so far. The way Hawkeye attracted trouble, Phil would probably catch up fairly quickly.

“Felix,” Clint said, stepping directly up to the interrogation table and coming to rest with his arms crossed on the back of Phil’s chair, the fine warm skin of his forearms just brushing the back of Phil’s neck, “we didn’t get a chance to talk much, back in New Jersey. Sorry I wasn’t there to welcome you to North Bar; got distracted by that little bit of arson you had your Agent Ward commit.”

 _What the hell is he doing in here?_ Phil thought, struggling not to turn and blink his confusion at Clint.

Felix hadn’t taken that much cracking, as far as Phil could tell. Natasha seemed to have softened him up nicely; all Phil had done was come in and give the final twist after the cap was nearly off, then dip into the jam. The larger problem was turning out to be how to get Felix to stay on _topic_. He’d have expected Fury to send Natasha back in to direct the conversation, if anyone.

(Which led him to wonder if he’d hallucinated Tasha the hen there are the warehouse at the end, and if not, whether Clint was going to produce _her_ next. After everything that had happened, he’d ceased to find the idea unlikely.)

“That wasn’t aimed at you, Clint,” Felix told him, leaning back a little to meet his eyes. “It was just collateral damage. Ward was just keeping Phil’s cousin from backing him up. I didn’t know.”

“Still came out to the same thing,” Clint told him. “It’s a crime against humanity, to deprive the world of those breakfasts.”

 _Oh god-- it was the Egg that burned?_ Why the hell hadn’t he hit Jawbones harder, while he’d had the chance?

“But to answer the question you asked Phil,” Clint squeezed his shoulder as he continued, “ _You’re_ our matchmaker, Felix. You and Quinn. Well-- indirectly at least. I didn’t meet Phil until after I got dumped into the ocean and left for dead. I only washed up on Phil’s beach, got rescued by his dog, and shed jellyfish on his floor, last month. Phil had nothing to do with your mess-- or SHIELD in general-- ‘till then. All things considered, I should maybe thank you.”

“Last month,” Felix repeated, his voice flat, looking between the two of them. “Last _month_. Impossible.”

“Absolutely true though,” Phil said, letting every bit of his own incredulity at the situation weigh his voice. “Clint, SHIELD, Avengers, all of it. I was just as off the radar as you wanted me.”

“Until you framed me,” Clint completed the thought for him, sounding cheerful about it. “Which, ya know, I’m still a bit pissed about. Given our history and everything.”

This was, despite the light tone of his voice, a sharper, more focused Clint than the one who’d managed to confound Skye into confession in the bunker back on North Bar. His barbs were acid-tipped, this time. Phil didn’t think Felix was any more fooled by the veneer of carelessness than he was. 

Phil found he _wanted_ Felix to be fooled; wanted to believe that he’d never known-- or if he had, he’d forgotten-- just how amazing Clint was. That when Felix had done what he’d done, it hadn’t been to a man who he’d known deserved the world. It was bad enough already that he’d betrayed a man who had trusted and mourned him.

“I didn’t mean to,” Felix said, clearly willing Clint to believe it, refocusing all his attention to that quarter. The last of the sardonicism had melted off his face, leaving him looking so old. 

Phil hoped Nick wasn’t leaning too closely against the glass, shadowing one of the hexagons. This was what he’d been working around to. They hadn’t been able to reconstruct Felix’s intentions towards Clint and the Avengers, when they’d gone back over the months of falsified access records leading up to Clint’s flight. Now that Felix had finally been flushed out into the open, Phil hoped the answers didn’t choke them all. 

“It was only going to be once or twice at first, and only because you were convenient,” Felix went on, hands spread palm up. “Just to dig into some files Fury didn’t want me to have access to. I still had your codes and your prints from Strike Team Delta days, when we used to share among us. I didn’t-- I didn’t think you’d mind, if you knew what I was using it for. It shouldn’t have led to any red flags. I would never have framed you or Natasha.”

“You _did_ , though, in the end,” Clint said. “Unless that was your Agent Ward again?”

“No.” Felix’s voice was starting to wear, and Phil debated a bottle of water. No, best not to break the flow now that it had finally started. “I was hoping, I supposed, if anything, that someone would ask you about the access patterns and you would get the hint that I was still around. That was… before Hydra. Before I knew how it could be seen, if people were looking for traitors.”

“And then Hydra happened.” Clint left his spot on Phil’s shoulder only to lean against the table. “Hydra happened, I resigned, and what? You thought it was a _great_ help to me to corrupt my record after I was already suspect, given my time with Loki?”

“No! I just-- it was only after Hydra that Quinn and Raina approached me about… _regularizing_ the relationship. Bringing me on as a partner. They’d just been fishing before that. It was… it turned into a mutually beneficial relationship.” The hard part to bear, for Phil, was the way Felix was clearly trying not to think about it, letting the words tumble out of his mouth, like it hurt to linger on. 

“‘Mutually beneficial’ meaning _what_ , exactly?” Clint interrupted, the torrent. Felix paused, rewinding his mental tape.

“Raina was the one who got me time in the theta wave machine,” he re-started, cautiously. “It opened the memories up, but they were so fragmentary, so… it was almost worse, then. Knowing a little but not everything. That was when I knew I needed more access than I could get on my own. So I used your profile, Clint.” There was pleading in his voice and the roundness of his eyes; too damn raw for Phil, who’d never experienced it before from Felix.

“Because I was ‘convenient,’” Clint said, the words flat and drawn.

“Because you’re an Avenger, above suspicion. Or if someone _did_ start to notice that people were poking around where they shouldn’t, I figured your name would put Stark off, keep him from being too nosy-- I underestimated his willingness to believe the evidence of his lying eyes. Agent Amador’s actions were unexpected and… well, it’s not my place anymore to criticize her skills at handling tricky suspects.”

So Clint, the ball rolling out the Tower that had nearly toppled SHIELD and the Avengers, that _had_ toppled Quinn and Blake, that had upended Phil’s entire quiet hermit life, had been set in motion mostly by accident after all. Or else Felix had made himself believe it; at this distance, how would they ever know?

“It didn’t end that way, though, did it, Felix?” Phil asked quietly, sliding it into the slivers of space where the breath of one of them stopped and the other started. “By the end, you were trying to convince the Avengers he was guilty.”

“By the end,” Felix said simply, “I thought he was drowned. No need to worry about the name of a dead man.”

Phil let that hang a long moment, staring at Felix, so jaundiced in his orange jumpsuit, circles and shadows in his face smudged nearly as black as what remained of his hair. 

_No need to worry about the name of a dead man._

Go ahead, just drag it through the dirt for whatever nefarious purposes.

While that dead man, meanwhile, only spoke the name of Agent Blake with reverence and fondness.

Behind him, Clint, bright and dangerous, shifted, his body settling in closer to Phil’s. He was watching Felix too, Phil knew, and his gut was probably churning just as sour. Their past, sitting across from them chained to a table. Their present… he swallowed the rest of the thought.

Before he had leisure time to devote to the subject of Clint Barton, and Phil’s place in the universe thereof, he had to complete the thing Nick had asked of him, “since you’re still a SHIELD agent and all, Cheese.” 

Phil sighed, tried to detach himself from all thoughts of powerful thighs on the table, and got back to the interrogation in progress.

As he and Clint took turns gently prying Felix open, exposing the sickly glup within his shell, Phil couldn’t help but notice Felix’s hands start to move again. As the interrogation wore on they went faster and faster, till he was probably hurting his fingers with the effort of pressing in to the metal table. Circles and loops, bars in long slashes.

 _Well that’s new_ , Phil thought, and resolved to ask about it later. Not like Felix was going anywhere fast.

\----  
To be concluded….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time on Washed Ashore: the end, with chickens.
> 
> There's a tumblr bonus [here](), a deleted scene from chapter one. In the first draft, Tony came in, instead of Steve. 
> 
> It should come as no shock to anyone that this chapter, as is now traditional with Washed Ashore, split. It’s a minor split, like last time.Chapter 27 will post either Monday or Tuesday. And that is it, my ducks. That is all she wrote. “The End” goes at the, well, end, approximately 275,000 words after we began. Both chapters are over 10,000 words long, but I don’t feel like cutting scenes so I can post as one. After so much story, I think we can manage 20,000 words of wrap up, don’t you?
> 
> NB: "Portolans" are old navigational charts, designed strictly to go from port to port, extremely accurate for that purpose but often distorting the larger geographical features unintentionally. Read the metaphor how you wish.


	27. Guide Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory chicken note: no chickens were evolved in this chapter.
> 
> As we head into the last chapter, I have to thank beta Faeleverte, over and over again, who is probably reading this as I type it into the Google doc. I’m calling her beta, but Fae’s so much more: my braintwin and collaborator, my sanity and very definitely my source of humor when I just want to shove this entire damned thing in a dark hole. 
> 
> This story would not have an ending without her.
> 
> (PS: if you're the kind who skips the sex, Kate and America get a little more graphic than I expected there in their last segment, although they still only hit an "M.")

**One**

Technically, Clint could have gone home that afternoon. He hadn’t, staying in SHIELD medical longer than planned for the first time in his life (and scaring several nurses in so doing), because once he walked out the door, he had no idea where to turn his steps.

He and Phil had a conversation pending, one that neither of them had expected to come so soon. 

Skye’d brought Doc Halliday to visit after lunch, beaming in her quiet little blue-haired way and insisting on checking her work on Clint’s burn. She’d brought them an african violet and a package of See’s candies, the kind containing all the myriad forms of nougat a fevered confectionary imagination could produce. Clint had politely refrained from poking the bottoms of each to determine which ones contained something edible, like caramel.

Phil’d perked up in her presence, and Clint had let the tide of their talk wash over him, foamy and warm. After the morning’s interrogation, he hadn’t thought that anything could have erased the hollows from Phil’s face so quickly, but she had done it with just one name. Lucky, she explained, was doing well, although he’d refused to be parted from his chickens for any reason. He’d growled suspiciously at Wanda when they’d arrived back on North Bar late that night, right up until she set Tasha the hen back down where Lucky could see her.

Lucky’d snuffled Tasha, sneezed, and then herded the wayward hen back into the coop. The glare she’d given him as his wet nose hit her butt was “positively reptilian, Phil. Some birds remember their dinosaur ancestors too well, and _that_ is one. Not a chicken to mess with lightly.” 

Doc Halliday had slept over on the island to care for him and for their flock, much to the relief of everyone in the hospital room. Clint had listened awhile longer, until Phil started asking about something arcane in the municipal budgeting realm, and then he turned back to Skye, who’d been hanging out with them and frowning intermittently at her phone.

Skye’d filled him in on Kate, America, and their friends, which had settled a couple of the worries about his human flock. She’d also described with great relish-- and copious use of the word “dreamy”-- her first meeting with Thor, who’d returned that afternoon with apologies for missing the battle (and with a takeout of mutton vindaloo for Tony, for no reason Skye could discern). 

“Tony’s got your room cleaned out,” she’d told him, looking up from her position sprawled at the foot of his hospital bed. “Got all your gear back from SHIELD, even changed the sheets. Hell, he asked me--” and then she stopped and snorted.

“ _What?_ ” Clint had asked, and she shook her head.

“Nothing. Really, nothing. Or, well, you’ll see.” She’d rolled over then, and looked straight up at Clint. “You moving back in there?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Clint had seen Phil stiffen, holding himself back from looking over with obvious effort.

“Are _you_?” Clint had countered, rather than answer Skye directly. “Looks like you’re half moved in already. I bet JARVIS would be happy about it. Hell, Tony might even let you park that moving scrapheap you call a van down in the garage. You could camp out and pretend it was like back on LBI.”

“Jerk,” Skye’d said, and hit him with his own very flat pillow.

She also hadn’t answered him.

“She’s holding out to see what other offers she gets, I think,” Doc Halliday had told him, as Clint had walked her down to the lobby, her hand on his elbow as fragile as if he were cradling paperwhites. “Are you going to make her one?”

“To do _what?_ ” Clint asked, then shook his head. “You mean Phil, if Phil’s going to make her an offer.”

“Maybe I do,” the Doc frowned, then reached up and patted him on the cheek. “We’ll keep her, if she wants us to, happily. She’s a big improvement on the place. We’ll keep you too, Mr. Barton, if you decide you want to stay. Even if you’ve let the those chickens get the run of the place while Phil’s been gone.”

“And all the trouble I bring with me?” he asked her, feeling warm against his will. “Because I can’t help myself, it just seems to happen. And I’m not talking about the chickens.”

“Yes you’re trouble, but at least you’re _interesting_ " she told him. “At my age, that’s all that really matters. You’re like Phil that way, you know.”

“You’ll be mad if you don’t get him back.” Clint didn’t bother to make it a question, because it clearly was not. None of their friends on Long Beach Island seemed the type to take a total desertion lightly.

“Of course. But we’ll also understand. He’s been underused, underestimated, and underemployed for far too long now. His limbs had started to grow crooked in his cage and I don’t think he even knew it. Best he spreads out.”

“I’m not sure that’s what he’s thinking,” Clint said. Then he kissed her cheek, because they were at the entrance and he had to tell her goodbye.

A steady stream of visitors, SHIELD and otherwise, had kept them busy the rest of that day, too. Clint had watched Phil handle them all with equanimity, seen them all off as visiting hours ended, and only then let himself go a little rodent-like about the edges, like he was looking for a burrow. 

Clint had slipped out to make a few calls, after seeing that.

They’d shared a romantic supper of institutional salisbury steak and steamed ribbons of broccoli, not really saying much, just looking at each other and smiling occasionally. Phil hadn’t bothered to shave so the stubble was starting to prickle up on his chin, bringing back fond flashbacks to the beard he’d had when Clint had first… had first _everything_ with him. Clint bit his lip and slurped tapioca pudding in an attempt to avoid going over and mouthing at the new fuzz.

“I love you,” Clint had said to Phil, as they’d slipped for a last time under their starched sheets, and Phil had melted into a smile.

“Love you too,” he said, and turned off the lights.

Clint kept expecting that to sound absurd or terrifying or ring hollow, and somehow, as always, it failed entirely to do so. He was as well versed in the kind of connection that close and traumatic experience creates as anyone in his line of work. Like actors, musicians and soldiers-- anyone who toured-- he’d learned the hard way to step back after a mission, give it a few days, a week, a month, and see if he was still interested. Or if his interest was still reciprocated.

He didn’t want to do so with Phil, even though he knew rationally it was likely even more important. Hell, after Phil’s experience with Holly, he might be waiting _years_ before Phil felt entirely comfortable that Clint wasn’t planning on leaving him for the next big adventure-- if Phil gave him years. 

Love itself was not the question. Love _staying_ was the part he suspected they both had gotten in trouble over in the past.

The thought that he might find out that Phil’s interest in sticking with him didn’t outlast the emergency-- _that_ left him breathless. Especially because Clint didn’t think his reluctance to take time had much of anything to do with any worry that he’d tire of Phil, or, come to think of it, of everything Phil brought with him.

“I miss North Bar,” he said into the dark, leaving it hanging for a moment before adding, “I’d gotten used to the creaks, I think. And to Lucky hogging the pillows. And… the smell. I miss the smell most of all. Jesus, Phil, and the chickens wandering the house like they live there. Which-- oops, and sorry, and we need to fix the latch.”

The dark wasn’t complete, light from the hall seeping through and the red glow of an exit sign flickering just outside the doorway. He closed his eyes to complete the illusion of uninterrupted night.

After a long minute, Phil stirred.

“Me too,” he said, barely above above a whisper, like anything louder might scare off some creature he was stalking. He cleared his throat before continuing more wryly. “Of course I do. You’ve corrupted me, Clint. I can’t stop thinking about which Steve I’m going to hug first.”

“‘Ready to be home?” Clint asked, trying to read the faint shifts of sheet to figure out how Phil had moved. 

“It’s not really my home.” Phil sounded strangled as he said it.

“Bullshit,” Clint growled. “You’re more at home there than most I’ve ever met.”

“Not my home,” Phil repeated. “Stark’s. I just keep it for him. Legally, I mean. I don’t… well. He owes me _something_ , I suppose. And if he doesn’t want me on his island anymore after all this, there are plenty of places in Gansett Light. Not the same, but Lucky’d be okay. And the chickens.”

He did not, of course, say that _he_ would be okay. 

“We’d muddle through,” Clint reassured him.

The intake of breath from across the room at that _we_ was about as shatteringly relieved as Clint could have hoped. Clint cracked one eye open, to find that his head was turned to Phil, and Phil’s to the ceiling, his own eyes screwed tightly shut and his face heartbreakingly open, even in the crack of dim warm light filtering the dark.

“I suppose so,” Phil replied, his voice still airless. Clint could almost see the words spiraling up and out, through the ceiling to the night sky. 

It had seemed easier without vision, just lying in the dark and listening to the sounds of the HVAC humming and Phil breathing, to let all his thoughts go free. 

“Skye wouldn’t tell me in specific, but I think Tony was trying to ask her if you were going to move into my room at the Tower,” Clint continued, watching that thought go, too, lonely as a flare going up on the open ocean.

“I’d have to, I imagine. I haven’t seen it yet-- your room. Couldn’t think of a good excuse to get in there and I didn’t want to pry....” Phil trailed off. 

“Yeah,” Clint replied. They spent a few minutes just breathing, matching their pattern. Clint waited it out with the same stillness he brought to sniping. Time to see if Phil had anything to send into the night, any matching flare.

“Doc Halliday was telling me about the fire brigade volunteering at the Hallowe’en carnival next week,” Phil said after a while. He seemed surprised, whether by the specific event or by the existence of carnivals themselves, Clint wasn’t sure, until he continued. “She was wondering whether we’d be there for it, or still stuck in here. I hadn’t really counted, but it’s been less than two months since I met you.”

“Wild, right?” Clint replied, in what he hoped wasn’t too strangled a tone.

“That’s one way to put it.” The awe in Phil’s voice settled him, before his next words went skyward accompanied by all of Clint’s breath. “I’m not taking any of it back, Clint. Not one word. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Welcome to my life,” Clint told him warmly. “It kinda gets that way.”

“I’ve noticed,” Phil said, grinning up at the ceiling now, his eyes still shut. “I don’t consider it a defect.”

Clint gave himself one happy moment just to watch that face, etch it into his memory. One moment, and then he took a deep breath and moved onto the next most pressing question.

“Phil? Are you… if the Avengers, if Fury… do you want to stay on?”

“They’re not going to ask me to,” Phil said, after a pause that seemed long enough for glaciers to advance and retreat. “So I’m not sure what good the question is."

"This morning Fury seemed to think you were still an agent of SHIELD."

"That was just for purposes of interrogation,” Phil said, shaking his head and finally opening his eyes to look at Clint. It was a bleak look, but not an uncertain one. “He won't want me. Imagine if it had been me in Felix’s place in in that room."

Clint shuddered and tried to stop the flood of images beating at his brain.

"I can't bear to think about it either," Phil said, reading his restlessness as accurately as always. "I missed Marcus, Clint. I want to know _him_ again; I'm not loyal to Nick Fury. He's yours."

"He is," Clint admitted. "And he's got got a tough road ahead of him."

"Very tough. But I'm not… I need to go home. I left a lot of responsibilities behind. Can’t just give them all up.”

“I wouldn’t want you to,” Clint told him, trying to inject every ounce of sincerity into his voice that he possibly could. “You wouldn’t be you. And… I want you to have North Bar still. If you possibly can.”

Phil’s answering nod was short and tight, his words clipped.

“You can…. I want.... It is stupidly early, but I’m too old to want to settle for waiting until some arbitrary sensible time, Clint.” 

“It’s scary,” Clint said, reaching out blindly into the tepid air, “the possibility it was just the adrenaline and the close situation after all.”

“It’s _terrifying_ ,” Phil said. “But not because of the possibility it was just adrenaline. It wasn’t.”

Fingers brushed Clint’s, at the far end of their range, and then Phil shifted in his bed and the fingers spidered up Clint’s palm and gripped tight.

“I agree. Okay.” The heat of Phil’s skin anchored Clint, pulled him down until he was bobbing on the swell of his heart. “Well, if you’re with me, I can ride out the terrified.”

“Good call,” Phil said, and then, soft and slurred, “love you.”

 _And people call_ me _amazing_ , Clint thought.

They let sleep take them at last. 

\----

“Oh come _on_ Coulson,” Tony yelled, flinging his hands up and executing a neat pirouette of frustration. “Don’t be this way.”

Clint walked into Nick Fury’s office, set down his duffel bag in a corner, and took in the scene. Fury was leaning back in his leather desk chair with his fingers templed, staring at Phil. _He_ was sitting in front of the desk, very conspicuously _not_ wearing a suit, and his hands were folded in his lap. Clint fought down the urge to compare him to a chicken roosting, unruffled and serene.

Tony was so far from serene it probably wasn’t even pinging on his radar, if the way he was pacing back and forth in front of the floor to ceiling tinted windows was any indication. His reflection paced next to him, against the spiked Manhattan skyline.

 _Been a long damn while since I saw those buildings_ , Clint thought, and then started as he realized that one of the spikes was less of a spike and more of a Steve Rogers, leaning against the edge of the window, his arms crossed, regarding them all with a face as bland as linoleum-- and looking like he’d just been stepped on, no less.

“Should I ask?” Clint said, meeting their eyes one by one, and not bothering to linger on Phil’s. 

“I thought you were back at the Tower, Clint,” Steve said, straightening up. “Is everything all right?” 

“Didn’t go yet; figured I’d be needed here more.” 

Tony and Steve had been determined to bundle Clint back to the Tower as quickly as possible, eager as kids bringing home a new puppy. Normally, Clint wouldn’t have minded the poorly-concealed display of affection that came with the _you’re probably missing your girls. Women. Um._ from Steve and the _got to make sure everything’s set before you get company right?_ from Tony. 

This time, though, he’d slipped straight back out of the town car after they’d left him in SHIELD’S parking garage, and come right up to the office, expecting to find exactly this. Clint had known exactly where Fury’d dragged Phil off to, after they’d both been discharged that morning, and he remembered their conversation from the night before with perfect clarity. 

“Yeah,” Tony said, huffing, “yeah you’re needed here. You can knock some sense into this idiot, right?” 

He waved a hand at Phil, who had turned to watch Clint, just a hint of curiosity peaking out from beneath his determined blank, mostly in the crinkle of the eyes. Eyes to which Clint was clearly not going to gain an immunity anytime soon.

“What’s up?” Clint moved into the room and shoved his hands in his cargo pockets-- and man it felt strange to be wearing his own clothing again, like shrugging back into an already-sloughed snakeskin. 

“I let Phil know I expected him to continue in his role as SHIELD liaison to the Avengers, and he turned me down,” Fury drawled. 

“And then Fury told him he didn’t have a choice in his assignment, and he resigned,” Tony said, poking at Phil. “This isn’t acceptable, Coulson. You broke us, you bought us. If you’re holding out for a better room or something, just say so.”

“I didn’t-- how did I ‘break,’ you, Stark? That’s not even-- it’s been _three weeks_ , and you were all this way when I found you,” Phil spluttered, slewing around in his chair.

“You know what I mean,” Tony shrugged, before turning back to Clint with appeal in his eyes. “Tell him.”

“I tried to warn you.” Clint directed his words and gaze at Phil, trying to inject some humor into it, in the hopes of de-ruffling him without resorting to shock tactics like public neck rubs. Phil shrugged back at him ruefully, taking the moment to release just a little wildness in his eyes. 

He looked just trapped enough that Clint nearly repented of what he was planning to do.

Nearly.

“I thought they’d be smarter than that,” Phil told him. His voice still sounded strained, but the longer he held Clint’s eyes, the less he looked like he was about to fly the coop. After a long moment, he snorted gently to himself. _Yeah, babe. Never was a chance of that. Starting to realize that, huh?_

Phil looked between Fury and Tony, then finally turned to Steve. 

“I lied to all of you, from the start,” he said. “To my old friends, to my _boss_ , Ms Potts. Every time you asked me for the truth, I had to give you another iteration of the lie. That’s not a recommendation for a liaison, just because I happened to be lying on Clint’s behalf. Even if it didn’t look desperate to outsiders, keeping me on after all this, it won’t work. You need someone you can trust.”

It was Steve who answered him, dropping the flat expression in favor of one of those little smiles that made grown men inexplicably crave apple pie, that light in his eye that had made a sensible man like Sam Wilson drop his entire life to get into a three-people-against-the-world war.

“We have someone we can trust. He just doesn’t much trust our judgement right now. I don’t honestly blame him.”

Phil gulped, hard. Clint wasn’t shocked-- Steve had moral authority that hit as hard as his fists, the bastard. He wound up for another punch, while Phil’s guard was down, and it took Clint out as collateral damage.

“See, you say it doesn’t matter that you were lying _for Clint_ , but that’s exactly the point. You gave us back our teammate, you kept him safe when he wouldn’t let _us_ , you brought him back, and I don’t think you ever were lying about anything except how you got here in the first place. Sorry, Coulson, I agree with Tony. You accepted this responsibility, knowing you were _it_ holding SHIELD and the Avengers together. Are you going to walk away now?”

 _If only Natasha were here_ , Clint thought. _She would appreciate the full subtlety of that blow._ His own diaphragm had stopped operating as he absorbed it.

For a moment, Clint thought Phil was actually going to give in. And then he shook his head.

“I’m flattered, but I can’t-- I was already too much of a risk, and it’s worse now. And I…” he crumpled just a little under Steve’s encouraging regard. “I just want to go _home_ ,” Phil finished, an edge of despair in my voice. “See my chickens and my dog. I have responsibilities there, ones I committed to long ago. I never meant this to be permanent; I’m sorry. I told you I lied to you.”

“Look, you don’t have to worry about North Bar, I can get another keeper for North Bar, one that isn’t wasting all his skills on a half dozen scientists every six months. For you, evenings and weekends are still on the table,” Tony wheedled. “So, you know, you can still take care of the dog, the chickens, get some time down by the ocean, or I dunno, stay up here and lounge around naked all day waiting for Barton to come home, whatever.” He overrode the start of Phil’s objection with a flap of his hand. “Sound good to you, Clint?”

“So good I plan to try it myself,” Clint said, and he finally stepped all the way into the room and flung himself into the seat next to Phil, letting their knees brush as he sat. 

Phil stilled, and Clint wondered if he’d guessed that was coming. He was utterly certain _Tony_ hadn’t.

“What the naked, or the ocean?” Tony asked.

“The time off,” Clint said, leaning forward and trying to channel Phil as he did. _Bland and pleasant. Bland and pleasant. Smile wider. Bland. Pleasant. Not psychotic._

“Yeah no,” Tony told him, cutting off Steve’s sudden protest and look of utter shock.

“I don’t _have_ to come back at all,” Clint replied. His heart had stopped beating as he said it, but under the circumstances, he thought he’d distracted them all too much for them to pick up on his nerves. “But if I’m gonna, that’s how it’s gonna be. Shift work. Time off for good behavior.”

“If that’s how you think of us now, like a _punishment_ \--” Steve began, nostrils starting to flare, but Tony-- to Clint’s eternal gratitude-- cut him off again, this time grabbing his arm and squeezing.

“Clint, we need you. You need us. You’re the one who’s always waiting at the Quinjet all suited up by the time the rest of us get there.”

“I’m the pilot, Tony.” 

“See! Damnit, Clint, just-- why?” Tony was growing increasingly agitated, his face going red behind his goatee as he struggled to meet eye contact and think of a good argument at the same time.

Clint fought down the smile that threatened to burst onto his face, and the wave of nausea that hit him simultaneously. _Oh god, I’m actually doing it. What if they decide they just don’t want me? What if I read Phil wrong last night?_

Phil shifted in his peripheral vision, and Clint broke eye contact with Tony to look back at him. Some faint sunrise was beginning to break on his cheeks, the folksinger coming back out from hiding beneath the man in the agent suit. 

_Worth it, if I can see that every day_ Clint thought. He opened his mouth, hoping he had his targets as dead to rights as they always were under his bow.

\----

“Jesus, Tony, look at me,” Clint waved a hand over his body, indicating the general dilapidation of his being. Phil didn’t look too hard, for fear of getting distracted by all the Clint-ness that lay beneath the bandaging and the threadbare cargo pants. He was still reeling from Clint’s declaration, and from the implication that someone else would-- could!-- take over North Bar.

It was one thing to acknowledge the probability to Clint in the dead of night, and a far different thing to hear the owner of the island tell him so. Some small part of him had still been hoping against hope that Stark would just let him go back to his old job. Not after this, clearly-- and of course the better part of his obligations were, ironically, cancelled if he was kicked out of his ho-- off Stark’s island.

_I still have the duties to Gansett Light, though. Like I told Clint._

Clint, who was providing a welcome distraction while Phil tried to manage the riptide of remorse trying to make him second-guess himself.

“I’m looking,” Stark told Clint grudgingly. “I mean, you don’t look great, I know, but for a guy your age--”

“Yeah,” Clint cut him off. “‘For a guy my age,’ Tony. Look, SHIELD has badasses who’re still field agents at forty and fifty and longer, but it takes a toll. And lemme tell you, Avengers work in general is like the worst days of Strike Team Delta, only all the time. I’m not getting younger.”

Phil started to nod solemnly, and stopped himself with an unpleasant start as he realized he didn’t actually know what Clint’s age _was_. News reports on his background tended towards the vague.

“Like I am?” Stark splayed both sets of fingers to his chest. “C’mon, Clint, that’s why we have the Tower-- so we can take care of you like SHIELD couldn’t. Keep us all fresh. Look you had a great vacation-- okay, maybe not a vacation, but a, uh, sabbatical, and I know maybe getting back into the swing of things seems like a climb but--”

“Stark,” Phil interjected quietly, once he realized no one else was going to-- Rogers because he didn’t really understand just how vast the gulf between what Clint was saying and what Stark was hearing was and Fury because… well who knew why. Fury’d been sitting behind his desk, a silent watcher, ever since Phil’d rejected his offer. “Unlike you, Clint doesn’t wear a suit. Clint, just how many bones do you break a year?”

“Hairline fractures inclusive or exclusive?” Clint asked, and Stark spluttered. That drew a rueful sort of laugh from Clint, and he looked back up. “I don’t break a bone _every_ year, Tony. I skipped 2011 after all--”

“Tibia. Christmas,” Fury reminded him, and Clint winced. 

“Right, and Project Pegasus was supposed to be a quiet place to heal up. Yeah, I forgot. Well, um… I think 2006 is clean.”

Fury’s nod seemed to allow that this was so. 

Phil fought down an unhelpful urge to yell-- he’d been the one who _asked_ , but he hadn’t expected it to be quite this bad. Perhaps he should have, what with the way Clint acted so nonchalant about leaping out of glass skyscrapers. A quick glance showed him that Rogers had stopped looking quite so horsey, more pony now than thoroughbred, and beginning to look thoughtful. Good.

“So you need better body armor--” Stark started, and Clint smiled at him.

“We’ve had this argument, Tony, and I’m willing to take more body armor as long as I can still fight properly. It won’t stop the fact that I’m slowing down a little. I take longer to recover than I used to.”

“But that’s no reason to _quit_!” Stark wailed. 

“I’m not! Tony, I’m trying to delay the day I _have_ to quit for as long as possible. God, can you just… stop being worried I’m trying to run off with a yoga instructor and listen? I’m not breaking up the band, all I’m asking for is what _Phil_ gets-- time _off._ Some kind of shift work.”

Wait.

No.

Clint _knew_ Phil wasn’t staying at SHIELD, what the hell was that about?

“I keep telling you all I won’t be needing--” Phil started at the same time as Stark, apparently incapable of letting anyone finish their sentences in this argument, pointed at Phil.

“Is this about spending time with your boyfriend?” he asked.

So Phil switched what he was trying to say to:

“Of course not--” but he didn’t get to finish that either. 

Clint reached out and gave his knee a possessive squeeze, leaning around him to confront Stark. Phil found himself transfixed by those long knobby fingers on the twill of his leg, and forgot what he was going to say.

“So what if it is?” Clint was asking. “Tony, I’m not the only one here who should just back _off_ a little. I don’t mean take an hour to go shopping here or there or sleep or even hang around the Tower doing the routine and waiting for the world to fall apart, because we do enough of that. I mean actually _not_ be on call on a predictable basis. My god, ask Pepper if she’d like to see you more than an hour a day sometime. Or get to have you in Malibu without you needing to fly off to some crisis in the middle of dinner.”

“Depends on when you ask.” Stark’s reply was quieter though, and he backed off a little. 

_Good. He’s starting to get it,_ Phil thought, purposefully not examining the idea that Clint was picking a fight with his team, his Avengers, in the interests of reordering his life-- however marginally-- around Phil. 

It wasn’t only Phil, of course it wasn’t. Stark could snark, but Clint’s “vacation,” however it had come about, had left him relaxed and cheerful, a warm presence in the cottage and around town. Here at SHIELD, he’d wound right back up into the efficient, wary, wry Hawkeye that Phil’d only seen once, just post-chicken slaughter. Now that Phil knew that Frank Barney was as real as Hawkeye, now that he knew _Clint_ in all his glorious muddle of cheerful babble about toes and deadly accuracy, Phil couldn’t bear the thought that one part of him might get shut back off. Whatever factors had gone into making this decision, it was transparently the right one.

“But,” Rogers broke in, finally stepping away from the window and still looking patriotically disappointed, “what happens when you’re not on call, Clint? Coulson’s one thing-- it’s easier to swap out liaisons for a weekend than it is Avengers. You’re our only archer. You’re our eyes up high. We all got hurt more with you absent.”

Clint winced, and Phil found himself growling before he knew what he was doing.

“Bullshit,” Clint said quietly, before Phil could. “Sam did a damn fine job, Steve. He’s your eyes up high now, when I’m not around. That’s easy enough.” 

Phil’s hand twitched, and he came within an inch of grabbing Clint’s hand and squeezing-- or going for a fistbump, maybe-- before changing the trajectory of his motion so that he was brushing imaginary hair off his arm. Clint could fondle him as much as he wanted; at the moment, in this office, Phil felt like initiating contact would be taken the wrong way by everyone else present.

“Right, but he doesn’t shoot like you do. Clint, the number of times we could have used a sniper--”

“So it’s a good thing you’ve had your own private sniper reclamation project going in Harlem, isn’t it?” Phil said, and Rogers turned to him with wide eyes. 

_I am more than capable of carrying the war to your home front, Captain_ , Phil thought, before he _heard_ the record-screech in his mind and realized just how far up his hackles had gone. _My god, my ten year old self would disown me._

“No. That’s not--” Rogers shook his head, and Phil began to wish he’d go horse-faced again. This sad puppy routine was far, far worse. “You don’t know how we found him. Sam and I put so damn much work into--”

“I thought it was Bucky himself who put so much work into putting himself back together,” Clint said mildly. “He didn’t take a lot of convincing when I asked him to come help save your ass. He knew exactly what he was getting into.”

Clint could have been saying it about himself, of course, in the wake of the Chitauri invasion. Phil could have said it about _him_ self, probably, when he’d walked into Avengers Tower with nothing but a listening bug inside his Captain America tie pin and a load of bullshit. Perhaps they were all just walking wounded, in various degrees of healing.

“I will not ask him to--” Steve started, and stopped, shaking his head. “He shouldn’t have to, just because we’ve got troubles.”

Bucky was good at war, clearly bored, and wanted to make amends. It didn’t seem like a terrible thing to give the man.

“Cap,” Phil broke in, “sometimes the best thing you can do is let a guy get back up on the horse. He looked pretty good out there.”

“And hey, if he’s up on a roof with a sniper rifle, he’s about as far as he’s gonna get from having to play Terminator assassin dude and jump off bridges,” Clint added.

“He’ll be on the roof, though, and he’s almost as dumb as you are about falling off things,” Rogers grumbled. There was a lightness to his eyes that Phil hadn’t expected to see, and it brightened further at Clint’s squawk of protest. 

“Anyway,” Phil mused, because the turn the conversation had taken was one he wanted to encourage, in that it got them away from this assumption they all kept making that he was going to change his mind, “he shouldn’t be your only recruit.” 

“He-- I’m sorry what?” Stark frowned, looking up from where he’d been trying to read the papers on Fury’s desk upside down.

“He shouldn’t be your only recruit,” Phil repeated. Seriously, it didn’t seem like so difficult a concept to him. After all, Clint shouldn’t be the _only_ one taking it a little easier. Natasha also seemed to get pulled in twenty different directions, and Stark himself was the poster child for overwork, despite all Pepper did. 

“Between Hydra and the escapees from the Fridge, between what seems like another corporate plot or dictator with an unfortunate tendency to acquire arcane alien artifacts, you’re all running on empty,” he told them. “Have been for a while. Clint’s right, there’s a difference between having time between missions and having time off duty. That, you haven’t had, and it’s showing.

“SHIELD’s supposed to be able to help you, but SHIELD-- I mean, _SHIELD,_ SHIELD is so crazily understaffed right now they hired a guy who’d been living alone on an island with chickens for fifteen years to be your liaison. And when they find out he was infiltrating the agency for nefarious purposes they refuse to fire him! They’re that bad off, and so are you all. You’re _exhausted_.”

From behind his desk, Nick Fury muttered something that in any other man might have been an “amen.” Phil refused to believe that of the Director of SHIELD. (Marcus maybe-- as long as it had been preceded by an expletive.)

“I know,” Stark said, dropping down to rest his rear end against the fine teak top of Fury’s desk. “I know. We all need a break. I’ve been working on it, okay? Got distracted by-- well, by SHIELD nearly falling and needing to handle all that, right? And Hydra. And Clint running away to the beach. But I do know. I think I’m close to perfecting--”

“Whatever the hell you’re close to right now I don’t want to know, but you might want to sleep more than every other night and _then_ take a look at it,” Phil snapped. “Or better yet, have Ms. Potts take a look at it, or at _least_ Captain Rogers. And you could do worse than having Nick get a look either.”

“Yeah, right now, me and SHIELD-- no offense, Nick--” Stark said, raising placating hands at Fury, who raised an eyebrow back at him.

“Which was all part of the plan, from Garrett on through Blake, I’m sure,” Phil said, even though he suspected it had originally been much more of a bonus prize along the way to a global security monopoly-- or world domination, conspirator depending. Still, the Avengers and SHIELD didn’t have to be best friends, but this rift was doing no one any good-- and he and Clint hadn’t nearly killed themselves and their girls just to make the divorce more amicable. 

“Let’s all agree that _everyone’s_ judgement ended up a little compromised in this scenario,” he said, leaning forward in the chair and disregarding the ache from the wound in his shoulder.  
“SHIELD missed it when Felix started to collude with Ian Quinn-- hell, managed to miss an entire super soldier assembly line going on between New Jersey and New Mexico. 

“You, Stark, managed to miss Felix building and maintaining a backdoor in JARVIS. You _all_ \-- well, except Natasha-- missed Clint hiding right under your noses with the help of a beard and a little contouring makeup. And let’s not talk about Clint’s stunt jumping out of a damned skyscraper in the first place, or-- I’m sorry, Captain-- how you all let yourselves get played by Felix waltzing back in. 

“You are overworked, under-rested, and under strain. Yet you’ve all decided that world security rests only on _your_ shoulders. I find I am _not_ unsympathetic to Franklin Hall-- I’m not sure _I_ would entirely trust you with world security right now. And now Clint wants to make sure he’s actually _able_ to be fresh and well-rested when he fights, and you’re _disappointed_ in him? You’re finding excuses _not_ to bring in help?”

Phil realized, vaguely, that he was somehow on his feet, vibrating with the intensity of his speech-- and it was, in fact, a _speech_ , if not an actual rant-- and that he’d dropped almost every vestige of the mental secret agent suit he’d taken to wearing when dealing with the Avengers. 

_Hell and Death. Did I just monologue? Is that what these people drive everyone to?_

Oh, well. It wasn’t like he’d been planning on working with them anyway.

Even though _someone_ clearly needed to.

“I get it; you went up against a god and an army from outer space and you won. Your allies turned out to hide your enemies. Every time you turned around you found another reason to think you were alone. You’re _not_. The invasion is over, SHIELD still stands, if barely, but you’re still behaving like you’re on the front lines and under fire. You’re the World’s Mightiest Ragtag Band of Misfits, and hell, it’d be all well and good if you weren’t actually the world’s last best defense. But you are, and you _put_ yourselves there. So you owe it to the world to start taking this _seriously_.”

“Fuck you if you don’t think I take this seriously,” Stark started, his face growing red beneath his beard. Rogers laid a hand on his arm, a clear _I’ll take this_ gesture, and turned to Phil as if he was perfectly rational and just trying to understand.

Except that the thoroughbred had returned to his face and was headed for full-on stallion territory, which was the kind of tell that someone ought to train him out of, sometime, if he ever wanted to win arguments like this. Because that was how Phil knew he was coming close enough to the bone.

“If you’d been here longer than three weeks, you would know how seriously we all take this,” Rogers said, his voice low and full of reefs as the Bay at neap tide. “Or just who are you suggesting we recruit? Your Kate Bishop and her friends?” He gestured out the window, vaguely in the direction of Avengers Tower. “Avengers-level work isn’t the kind of job where you can go to the labor hall and pick anyone off the bench. You can’t seriously be suggesting _them_. They’re kids.”

“I’m not suggesting them” Phil said, holding his eyes. “They’re not ready.”

“I am, though,” Clint said cheerfully. “Suggesting them, I mean.” 

Everyone turned to him, still lounging in his chair. Clint had a lingering lightness on his face that Phil associated with awe. He always had when talking about Kate or Skye, whenever he was sure they weren’t around. (And sometimes, sometimes, when he was talking about Phil himself.)

“Clint, you will get them _killed_ ,” Steve hissed. “They should not be anywhere _near_ us.”

“Oh not _now_ ,” Clint said, waving the argument away as if it had never been an option in the first place. “No, Kate’s like nine years old still, and I haven’t even met her friends-- except America. I’d almost take America. But no, not now. Telling you though, Cap, whenever you really _do_ lose me? You will regret it if you alienate Hawkeye right now. And you think it’d actually hurt to have a woman who can pop a dimensional portal out of her pocket on the team? And, I dunno, beat up dinosaurs bare-handed and shit? I’m not suggesting like a junior Avengers or anything, but I _am_ suggesting we train them, mentor them. Try an’ keep ‘em on something resembling the righteous path.”

“Like you’d know what that is,” Stark muttered, and Clint winked at him.

“Clint--” Rogers started, then closed his eyes and dragged his hands through his hair.

_We’ve nearly got him._

“I gave younger kids than that RPGs,” Phil told him gently. “And I’m betting you did something similar, Captain. Clint _was_ that kid. They put themselves out there, you know that. If you don’t want them getting killed, pushing them away entirely isn’t going to help. They’re just going to go and do it on their own. But no, they’re not Avengers, not now. No missions.”

“Then _who?_ ” Stark asked. 

“Well,” Phil said, and he looked over his shoulder at Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD. Somehow, despite the fact that it was his office they were all standing around yelling in, and despite the habitual melodramatics of his outfit, he’d managed to make them forget he was there, yet again. Phil needed him now, though. “I’m told SHIELD had an Index.”

Fury grunted. 

“I thought you scrapped that, after Hydra,” Stark said, looking up at him. “I thought that was gone….”

“Never _that_ gone,” Clint said, and shrugged when Stark glared at him. “Oh, come off it, Tony. That was the cover story, sanitized for your protection and theirs. Or if you’re so set on sharing, explain that project you said you’ve been working on to Fury. There were people on that Index you didn’t just let back out onto the street. I never liked the goddamn idea, but I don’t like the Avengers going up against a worst-of list of ‘em either, which was what Felix was going for. Most of ‘em aren’t going to work out though,” he continued, turning to Phil then back to Fury. “Right sir? Either you lost track after the Triskelion, or they escaped the Fridge-- or they’re just not ready.”

Fury nodded, his face closed-off.

“But a few may,” Phil pressed. 

“They can’t have had training,” Rogers objected. “Even if they’re… stable… right now, they can’t have had enough training. Those ones you’re still in contact with, what do they _do_?”

“Mostly,” Fury said, walking in and sitting down, belling his coat around him, “they live normal lives. We check in every so often, that’s all. Phil, if they wanted to be soldiers we’d have recruited them.”

“You only need one or two,” Phil said, “and Cap, with all respect, you didn’t have training when you volunteered either, that’s what Basic was for. Stark here just seems to have made it up on his own. Find the people who like to run towards the fire, and give them the training. Just make sure you can rotate off duty, all of you. Someone to back up Natasha--”

“Hey,” Clint said, “Agent Morse is going to be needing another assignment now, Nick, isn’t she?”

“I don’t think--” Fury said, and then stopped, and clearly _did_ think. “Huh,” he said at last. “Well you could meet her anyway. She can fight-- and she could use a fresh set of faces, after this.”

Stark had stopped paying attention, in favor of muttering something to Rogers. Whatever it was, it was effective; Rogers’s shoulders were ratcheting down by degrees, returning to something like a normal position.

“Others will come up, if we’re looking,” Phil said, drawing them all back together. “But the point is you’re all trying to do too much with too little and in the wrong way.”

“What _did_ we do without you?” Stark drawled. It was said without rancor-- in fact, he sounded more amused than anything. 

In retrospect, Phil would remember that, and curse himself for missing the signs. He was exhausted, had recently been wounded, was worried about his chickens and his lover, and all the ranting he’d been doing had made him light-headed. That, if anything, had to be his excuse for fatal obtuseness.

“You’re not bad leaders,” he said to Stark and Rogers, “but my God do you need someone to do logistics. Not necessarily someone back at the Tower running ops-- anyone can do that, frankly. Better to get someone who isn’t going to try and play hero. Either that or let the promising young SHIELD agents rotate through. No, what you’re missing is someone recruiting and managing intel, who knows _your_ needs, not the needs of strike teams or SHIELD, or-- frankly-- multinational corporations.”

“Probably should be an independent contractor, in that case” Fury put in, his voice dry. “Remove some of the trust issues we’ve been having, don’t you think?”

He said that last part to Rogers, who gave him a little grimace of agreement, followed by a laugh. It was the closest thing to detente Phil had seen from them yet and, idiot that he was, it warmed his heart.

“And the trust issues on the SHIELD side too,” Clint agreed. “It means you can basically set their security level at your will, right, Director? It’d be an end run on a lot of that need-to-know nonsense that tied Phil up, or made you tie down Level 8s unnecessarily.”

Phil started to nod along, before stopping. His unfortunately quiescent instincts had started to wake up, and he was suddenly hearing a train whistle in the distance. His eyes flicked between Nick and Clint. 

“Huh,” said Stark, looking down at his hands and chewing on his lower lip. “That’d actually be a halfway decent solution. I mean, a contractor could work remotely, right? Office at SHIELD, office in the Tower, office… you know, wherever. Jersey, maybe. We’ve got fast transportation, if they’ve got a place to land it. Hire their own team. Security’d need to vet them, but I know a computer expert I’d suggest, for a start…. What do you think, Cap?” His eyes were challenging. “It’s one way to keep a little distance between us and the teenagers, right? If a third party is wrangling them-- and us?”

“I--” Rogers stopped, clearly integrating this new angle into whatever plan had already been simmering in his head. “Yeah,” he nodded after a moment, the last trace of equine-imity disappearing from his features. “It has promise.”

“It’s more than a full time job, though,” Clint put in, “and I think we did emphasize shift work.”

_We did?_

“Eh, that’s the contractor’s problem,” Tony shrugged. “They can always hire more help. Especially if they’ve got other obligations taking up part of their time. You’ll find us someone good, right, Phil?” he asked, finally looking back up. “You’ll be the boss, after all.”

 _If you can’t tell who’s the sucker at the table, it’s probably you,_ Phil thought, with a dropping sensation in his gut.

“It doesn’t _have_ to be me,” he tried.

Fury snorted.

“I’m gonna find someone else who’s already got security clearance with SHIELD so quickly? If I could, I would have. Would have signed ‘em up like I did you. You think we can do that, _and_ find someone who is, and I quote, enough of an ‘adrenaline junkie’ not to run screaming at the idea? And if we _do_ , are you really gonna trust ‘em to handle your girls-- much less these fools?” He waved a lazy hand around the gathered Avengers, starting with Tony and ending with….

Ending with Clint. 

They were all staring at him, identically blank expressions on all of their faces except Clint’s. _He_ was grinning beatifically, as self-satisfied as if he’d just been sucking on Phil’s toes… and that was something Phil really shouldn’t think about at the moment.

Or maybe he should.

Because the thought of trusting Clint’s safety-- or Kate’s and Skye’s and anyone they tried to train-- to someone who might be another Felix Blake, turned his stomach. He knew what would happen, if they kept this thing going and he retreated to Long Beach Island to raise chickens and serve on the Fire Brigade. 

And he was pretty sure he didn’t want to end up the Yoko Ono of the Avengers. 

_I’m already so far compromised I don’t see how I could get worse_ , he thought. _And hell, if it comes to that, I’ve probably got_ less _of a conflict of interest, just being Clint’s… Clint’s… just loving Clint, than I did three weeks ago._

Sometimes, Phil hated his own brain. Hated the part of him, too, that was sitting in the rollercoaster car, looking down over the edge of the big drop, and screaming “wheeeeee!”

_Goddamnit._

“One condition,” he said, glaring at them all, daring any of them to smile (well-- any of them except Clint). “No. Two conditions, one each.” 

He pointed at Nick Fury-- at _Marcus_ \-- first. The bastard had gotten him into this mess, after all, and anyway his poker face was beginning to take on the smug little lines around the corners of the lips that had always made Phil want to growl. 

“I get Melinda May, if she’ll walk,” he said.

“I’m sure she’ll be relieved,” Fury told him, “seeing as at SHIELD I’d have to send her back out in the field, and she’s sworn up and down and sideways she’s done with it. Hell she told me that again last night after she came back from New Mexico. I can’t leave her in HR though. I _should_ be firing her ass for letting you get through security.”

“ _You_ offered me the job,” Phil responded. 

“I’d fire my own ass, too, if I thought I could get away with it. I can’t speak for May, but I doubt you’ll have problems. May be paying her an arm and a leg, though.”

“It’s okay, I’m sure my contracts will cover it. They’re going to be very generous. And,” Phil looked over at Stark now, and debated just how nonchalant he wanted to play this one, just how deeply he could bury his tell.

_Ah fuck it, just go all in. Some things are worth it._

“You already know what I want from you,” he said, letting it show. 

“Yeah,” Stark nodded. “Yeah I kinda figured. We’ll talk. It’ll happen. Hell-- solves a problem for me. I had that woman, Wanda Jackson, haranguing me for fifteen minutes about my ‘responsibilities as a property owner’ of the town yesterday. I blame _you_ , since it was pretty clear you were what she wanted.” 

Phil knew Wanda had visited Avengers Tower while Doc Halliday had come to see him and Clint-- now, he struggled to visualize her turning all her righteous fury on Tony Stark. It was unexpectedly touching. Gathering Clint, watching Phil’s chickens, even giving Bruce a lift into a fight between superheroes and super soldiers, all these things were within his old image of her, if barely. Her being deliberately rude to a person with as much money and real estate-- both actual and on the front page of the New York Post-- as Stark had? 

_I never knew she cared._

Phil reached out and grabbed Clint’s hand, squeezing it tightly, trying to draw as much strength from that solid anchor as he could. 

He nodded finally, his ears buzzing and his head light. Then he nodded again, just to settle himself.

“All right then,” Stark said, “That’s settled. So-- you coming back, Barton? We just hired your boyfriend. Can’t walk away now.” He was smirking, smug as a cat left too long with a fishing boat, and Phil couldn’t bring himself to feel too put out about that.

“Shift work, Tony, I told you,” Clint smiled back at him, “and a motorcycle.”

“A what--?” Stark asked. 

“Just for good measure. Hell, a flying one. How’s that sound, babe?” he turned to Phil, who realized he was grinning like a loon, probably a near mirror-image of Clint.

“You’re a nut,” he said fondly.

“You wouldn’t have it any other way,” Clint agreed, and he raised Phil’s knuckles to his hand to kiss.

As an indication of how their professional relationship was going to go, it was probably more of an early warning than a good sign. Phil leered at him in return, just because it felt good to.

“Aaaaaand on that note,” Stark said, straightening up and suddenly very concerned with shooting his cuffs, “Goodbye. Have a good day. See you, um, we’ll… soon. Please remember you two are injured. And have stitches. And are in SHIELD. In Nick Fury’s office. In broad daylight.”

“Mm,” Clint said, not looking up. 

He was gone from the room before Phil could say a proper goodbye, with Rogers a half-step behind him.

After a moment, Phil and Clint turned back to Nick, still lounging behind his desk. He put one foot up, scattering a pile of papers, and followed it with the other. 

“Oh don’t mind _me_ ,” he said, waving his hand. “Carry on.”

 

**Two**

The lights of Manhattan spangled the night below, sluggish streams of clear red and magnesium, porcelain green and thin white blue, washed with halide and pale sodium yellow. When Kate looked up, the sky was lavender shading into midnight blue. There were no stars above her.

For something that had been familiar since her childhood, it felt so oppressive now.

She heard a step behind her, and then America’s arms snaked around her waist, taking away the chill of the night air so many stories above the pavement. Kate tilted her head back in greeting, getting lost for a moment in the clouds of America’s clean, mango-scented hair.

“It’s done,” America said, her voice rumbling as Kate nipped her earlobe. “And you’re dangerous, chica.”

“Mmm,” Kate agreed, “so’re you though. Stop being sexy. ‘S tempting me.”

America shifted behind her, breasts pressing against her back, hips shifting against her ass. Kate was torn between shoving America away, and dropping to her knees, to nuzzle in and bury herself nose-first, licking her way between America’s thighs with her pressed right up against the rail, moans lost against the noise of the bustle far below.

“ _Damnit_ ,” she said, taking the middle ground and wriggling her neck away from America’s questing lips, “I mean it. We don’t have time; who knows when they’ll be back. Tell me what they said.” She resettled herself against the balcony railing, trying to find a way to nonchalantly press her own thighs together.

America disengaged with a chuckle, and reluctantly moved to lean over next to her, watching the streams of traffic.

“They were all hella mad--”

“I figured,” Kate cut in, trying to be calm and mature about it.

“-- because we didn’t let them in on the action.” America finished, grinning at her.  
“Yeah,” Kate said, because sometimes she felt like the only mature one _ever_ , “I figured that, too. They gonna be all right?”

“Oh, sure,” America shrugged. “I mean, Eli was mad, but once he had the number for Pepper’s lawyers in hand, that helped. He still doesn’t want to have to explain it to his parents. Billy and Teddy were their usual selves.”

“Didn’t take it seriously at all?” Kate asked, and fought the urge to put her head in her hands. 

“Right again. But it’s okay; if your Dad does give ‘em any trouble, chica, Stark’s already lawyered up for ‘em. They’re gonna be all right. And _if_ I were your Dad, I wouldn’t squeak. Not the way SHIELD’s gotta be ransacking his place now. They were more mad about the rest of it, really.”

“We’re not taking them with,” Kate said, straightening in alarm. A second’s thought actually made it sound appealing-- the entire gang off and roving. Another second’s thought nixed it: an entire gang all up in her and America’s space. _Nope. They can wait ‘till I don’t want to ravish her every time she shifts her stance._ “We’re really not, America. I want…” she trailed off.

“We don’t have to go at all, if you don’t want, chica.” America said, moving in to chuck Kate under her chin, bringing her head up and looking into her face with eyes dark as the sky behind her. “You’ll be safe too, if we stay here.”

“In another tower, though.” Kate wrinkled her nose. “I can’t go back to North Bar right now, America, not while everything’s a mess. I _really_ can’t go back to the Trashcan, and I don’t wanna break into bungalows with you.”

_And I can’t stand to be back in New York right now. I can’t stand to stay still, now that we’ve started moving. When I stay still, I remember the blood on the floor of the warehouse. I see faces I don’t want to see again._

“You’re not gonna miss Hawkeye?” There was a twinkle in America’s eye-- or maybe that was a reflection from inside the Tower, because it certainly wasn’t a star in _this_ night sky. 

“Yeah?” Kate asked, and then broke up laughing. 

_Yeah_ she was gonna miss Clint Barton, and yeah she was gonna miss training with Hawkeye, that sarcastic way he had of praising her that somehow left her feeling like she was learning to ride her first bike, with her mother beaming at her. But it felt right to get some distance, too, because god _damn_ he could be frustrating sometimes, and she didn’t think she wanted to be around when he was humping Coulson’s leg every other minute. “I mean-- yeah, for sure, but I figure I’ll be back, when he and Coulson have stuff figured out, right?”

 _If_ he got shit figured out-- he’d said on the phone that he and Phil were working out ways to get her and her guys some training, some kind of junior Avengers camp. She hadn’t said _that sounds lame_ , because he sounded like he knew, from the way he’d described having to keep Captain America happy. She didn’t really want to sit around and do junior league shit either, at the moment.

If he really wanted her, he could give her some _real_ work to do with him, but Kate had grown a little subtle in her old age, and she knew he’d have to wait ‘till Captain Buzzkill had stopped paying attention. 

If Clint’s interest lasted that long, that was.

Eh. Screw it. He’d seemed happy enough to see her, in the hospital, and he hadn’t even been drugged. And the Black Widow had given them the yoga pants off her-- okay, not _quite_ off her own self. If Kate couldn’t manage to wriggle her way back into Clint’s graces whenever she popped back up, she ought to just pack up her bow and go home.

 _No,_ she thought, watching America watch her, _Clint’s not that much of a dick, and if he was-- this is still worth the chance._

“You’re certain?” America said, once more, and Kate nodded. She felt solemn, and the gesture seemed out-of-place heavy, so much riding on it she thought at first she wouldn’t be able to complete it.

When she was finished, though, she felt like flying.

“Yes. God. I need… I need to go just be me. With you, all to myself. Just… ‘till we get bored and decide to come back and kick ass, right?”

America’s smile could have lit up the entire sky, if Manhattan itself weren’t already.

“You won’t see me complain about getting to show you off to the universe, chica,” she said, and reared back, ready to punch the sky.

“Oh, wait wait--” Kate stopped her with a hand on her arm. America turned to her, a question in her eyes. “One thing first.”

\----

Emily screamed and collapsed as satisfactorily as any daytime player, even managing to put the back of one hand to her forehead as she slumped down into the ivory leather armchair. 

“Sorry, Em,” Kate said, because now that she saw how pale and haggard Emily looked, she _did_ feel sorry. “Didn’t mean to just disappear like that on you. Things kind of escalated.”

“Katherine Bishop--” her father growled, standing up and leaving the dimly-lit cave of a kitchen to stalk over to her. The Trashcan’s windows were open as always to the night, the surf and stars spangling them. He was backlit just a little, his moustache bristling, but he wasn’t that intimidating, seeing as he didn’t look like he’d slept in the last few days.

The Trashcan itself was kind of, well, trashed. The secretary that lived by the door was open, all its drawers still half-pulled out, and everything else was subtly _not_ where it was supposed to be. Kate didn’t want to think about the state of her Dad’s seldom-used office. 

“Hey Dad,” Kate said, standing up straight. “Miss me?”

“Miss-- _miss_ you?” he spluttered, going pink as a half-ripe tomato, and just as splotchy. “Preservation Society my _ass_ How dare you even come back here? Did you know? Did you-- what did you _do_?”

“Me?” Kate asked him, pointing to herself with an air of innocence that wouldn’t have fooled a three year old, and using America’s hand to do it, since she hadn’t let go. “Nothing much. Well-- nothing much you’d care about. Just hung out with some friends, shot some arrows-- maybe got a bit mixed up with the affairs of spooky-ass government agencies….” She looked around meaningfully.

“Government age-- you? _You_ ’re responsible for this? For the raids, for-- they-- how _dare_ you, Katherine? Do you have the least clue what this will do to my reputation?”

She did. Oh, she had no doubt Derek Bishop would manage to recover-- as long as he really _had_ been clean, only stupid in his choice of friends. But it was going to be a long time before the more fastidious sorts of investors touched him. Fortunately for him, “fastidious” and “investor” weren’t really synonyms. It was gonna sting short-term, though.

The stab in her ribcage was telling her to be sorry about it, to knuckle under to her Dad and his rage, to start snivelling and saying she’d be good. America’s hand in hers, though, and her other hand on her own dear golden bow, sent her a different message.

_I’m nineteen. I just helped save the Avengers. You’re nothing compared to that, Dad._

“You’ve got only yourself to blame,” she told him, hearing the note of satisfaction curl her voice. “I’m not the one who brought Ian Quinn here.”

“I will make your life miserable,” he told her, eyes narrowing. “Do you hear me? After everything I did for you, everything I spent on you, all the time-- you ungrateful girl. You can tell your friends to get used to jail, because I promise you--”

“You can promise Pepper Potts’ lawyers, Dad,” Kate broke in, “if you even try it. You _might_ win the trespassing case if it comes to court, but they’ll drag it out so far you’ll have to sell the penthouse to pay for it. And they _can_.” There. That felt good. 

The rest of it, watching her father nearly explosive with rage and Emily shrinking into the background, was growing old fast. It was starting to taste more of bile and less of victory. It was also effectively ending her relationship with her father, she supposed-- and she didn’t have much of a relationship with anyone _but_ him, family-wise.

_Maybe if I play my cards right, Clint’ll let me come over for Thanksgiving._

Well, stupid or not, she’d made her choice. There was only one last thing to do, because if she was gonna cut loose, she might as well let every last line go.

“Anyway,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I just came here to say goodbye. I’m off for… I’m not sure how long. Emily,” she turned, “I really am sorry. I kinda suck at being babysat. And Dad? Before I go-- I just wanted to introduce you to America.”

She drew America forward, keeping their hands clasped, and feeling pride tighten her chest. America looked over at her with a look that promised the world, if not a universe or two, and turned back to her father.

“Hi, Mr. Bishop,” she said, waving her free hand.

“She’s my girlfriend,” Kate chirped. 

And _then_ she let America break them out of the dimension.

It was a hell of a curtain call, if she said so herself.

**Three**

The carnival was nearly set up, with all its attendant dunking tanks and dishpans full of apples and really suspect water, it’s bean bag tosses and cakewalk stations. The cakes themselves, and all the plastic prizes that would last a week before getting lost behind beds or stuck into radiator grills or otherwise obliterated, wouldn’t be coming until morning. 

Tonight, Lauren Halliday had explained to Natasha as they finished placing the blue tape around the Quonset hut’s floor, laying out the colored construction paper that formed the cake walk stations, was for the adults. There was a long-standing tradition of retiring to the Gansett Light firehouse the night before the Hallowe’en carnival, to get sociably drunk, dance to dubious music, and pretend that they were mature adults who hadn’t spent the entire time they’d been setting up the carnival grousing about the live beta fish they’d _nearly_ won back in fourth grade, if only the games weren’t crooked.

Natasha could hardly believe Clint was missing it.

“And all this raises money for the school?” she asked, straightening up and cracking her back.

“Normally,” Lauren said, following her gaze to the well-rounded backsides of Captain America and Bucky, who were jointly painting Cap’s shield on one of the beanbag targets. “The kids voted, though, to give the proceeds to the owners of the Outrageous Egg, to rebuild. There was something about insurance not covering acts of terrorism.” 

Natasha winced.

“You know,” she said, “if anyone asked Tony, he’d pay to rebuild the whole thing. I’m surprised he _hasn’t_.”

“Yes, I imagine he would.” Lauren’s gaze lingered on Steve’s jeans-clad rump, and Natasha tried not to laugh. “But if he did, the damn place would probably end up twice as big and with a jet-propulsion griddle, and nobody wants that. Anyway, some things you do as a community, to keep yourselves community. Do you know, his rear view is even better in person than it was in all those old film reels?” 

“I wouldn’t know,” Natasha managed to choke out, between the laughter that was threatening to strangle her. It was her undoing.

James heard her and looked up, and his face spread into a wide lazy smile as he realized what she and her elderly blue-haired dirty-minded companion had been discussing. He rose and stretched, clearly presenting himself for their approval-- or at least Doc’s, which she gave with a slow wink.

“Have I seen that young man before?” Lauren asked, as James started to amble closer, followed by Steve himself, who was giving his best one-sided smirk, the one that suggested he knew exactly what you were thinking and while it wasn’t the funniest thing he’d ever heard, it was a good effort. “Is he one of you Avengers?”

“Not yet,” Natasha told her, “but we’re all doing our best to talk Steve around on it. He and James…” she paused, then started again, “they’re friends. Old friends. Steve gets protective.”

“Ah,” the Doc nodded sagely, “not at all like you and anyone we know.” 

“They bear a certain resemblance,” Natasha drawled, almost shocked to find how easily she was able to smile about it already, with the benefit of a few days of rest and the sight of Clint back at the Tower, assiduously re-arranging his room to fit two. “After all, Steve needs somebody to keep him from being stupid too, sometimes. He spent half the evening moping just because this place reminded him of the war.” She pointed at the vaulted ceiling.

“Yeah, I got that from him too,” James said, coming up close and nodding at both women in greeting. “I had to remind him that at least they found some use for the old relic, and maybe he should take a lesson.”

“Hey!” Captain America protested. “I’m useful!” James looked over at him and sniggered.

Natasha watched them both fondly, then looked over the completed carnival. The Quonset hut was mostly deserted now. The other townsfolk and various scattered Avengers had already decamped for the fire hall, and she was certain the party would be in full swing by the time they got there. Sam had left leaning on Tom-from-the-Blue-Peter for support, and Thor had been in the middle of a mob of volunteer firefighters. Tony had long since disappeared, his sleeve caught in Wanda Jackson’s pincer grip. 

“I think your work here is done,” Lauren Halliday said, with satisfaction, and Natasha had to agree.

 _They’ll be all right,_ she thought. _We’ll be all right-- Clint and I, Steve and James, our team. We’ve faced the worst._

Then she automatically cursed herself inside her head for jinxing all of it.

“Come on,” James said, and she looked up to find him holding out his left arm, enticingly multi-faceted under the colored scrims. “The Doc cut out Steve, and she’s making him escort her to the fire hall. How much you want to bet she goes for his ass before they make it?”

“She’s more subtle than that,” Natasha told him, and slid her own arm through his, leaning in to the cool metal. “She’ll wait until they’re in the crowd, and she can blame it on someone else.”

They walked through the door into the autumn air.

\----

Skye was standing outside the fire hall, letting the sounds of laughter and the Bangles filter out into the evening. Spilled beer, burnt garlic, and fried fish wafted out with it, twining with the melody. Her head felt muzzy, like she was at the end of a thirty-six hour sprint to crack a server, that butt-end of the night time when code blurred like rain on windowpanes. There was no reason for it, not really. 

Nothing except _people_ , so many people, and all of them doing something that very few people in her life had ever done: _noticing_ her.

She slid down the wall, ‘till she was sitting against the foundation and could run her fingers through the cold sand and the tufts of dead crabgrass growing in the cracks. Slowly, her mind cleared.

The number of people coming up to her inside had far exceeded anything she’d imagined. All of them had something they wanted from her, demanding in various voices urgent or wheedling to know whether she was _staying_ whether _Phil_ was staying, and what Frank-- _Hawkeye, sorry, that’s still kinda weird_ \-- was planning to do now. 

Some of them were eager to know all the details, some more than a little skeptical of anything that resembled excitement, and all of them a bit shocked that the Avengers had actually come to _Gansett Light_ \-- didn’t that beat all? 

Wanda Jackson, now that the crisis was past, had reverted to the inveterate gossip Skye’d first known her as. She was selling her chicken-and-Hulk story widely, for the price of another cosmopolitan, winking as she got to the part of the story where they arrived at the warehouse and saying “well you can read that in the news.” Skye’d been alarmed the first time she’d overheard Wanda, and listened long enough to be sure she wasn’t giving away anything classified.

She wasn’t-- Wanda turned out to be even better than Phil at spinning a tale without saying much of anything-- but the very fact that Skye’d been so concerned about SHIELD’s secrets had startled her a little.

Tom’s reaction to all the revelations had been more measured, though Skye thought he was still sulking that she’d given her two week’s-notice. She’d _hoped_ that the disappointment would have been tempered by finding out just whose fingerprints he’d swapped with, but Tom hadn’t cared a bit. It had been the least he could do, for a friend of Phil’s, was all he’d said about it. Like concealing someone’s identity was just something you did in a neighborly way, the equivalent of letting them borrow your weed-whacker. (At least, Skye assumed that was what neighbors did, in the normal way-- she’d seen it on a sitcom, she thought.)

It’d been Tom’s steadfast refusal to believe he’d done anything exceptional that had sent Skye scurrying into the night, desperate for a space to gather her thoughts. It had reminded her of exactly the way Phil himself had fallen into conspiracy just because you helped people who needed help-- and to her shock, she’d realized she identified with it way, _way_ too well.

“Hey,” said a voice above her head, and she looked up to find Tony Stark leaning in the doorway, smirking down at her.

“Hey yourself,” she said, “you finally got away from Wanda, huh?”

“Not without taking damage,” he told her, and wandered out to sit down next to her, looking nearly natural on the sand in his jacket, faded jeans and ZZ Top t-shirt. “My checkbook is going to feel that in the morning. Still, the kids need textbooks, and uniforms and… saxophones, I think she said. Tubas, maybe. Anyway, it wouldn’t be fair if they’re out all of that just because they want to have a place to get banana pancakes again.”

“So a check?” Skye asked, wondering why he was settling in-- she’d never thought of him as being particularly unhappy in crowds.

“Check… and a few hundred StarkPads. And some tech. Don’t want the disaster Apple had, even if it wasn’t Apple’s fault. With the iPads. In the schools. I blame the principals, really-- who the hell thought letting kids download yamblr was a-- anyway. Seemed easy enough to do. Pepper’ll work out the details, she always does. Nice night.”

“It is,” Skye said, watching him. He was unwinding in front of her, it seemed like, his smirk losing it’s irk and becoming a smile as he let his own fingers run in little channels through the sand, kicking up ridges to either side as they passed.

“No idea why Clint and Coulson are so attached to that overgrown patch of swamp out on North Bar,” he continued, blinking up at the low clouds and the naked trees, “but I could get used to this place.”

“It’s overrun in the summer,” she said, rather than grab him by the lapels of his jacket and growl at him that he was never going to speak about North Bar that way again _ever_. After all, he was paying for the big house’s renovation, which included a room for her _and_ a technology room that would make the NSA drool. She could afford to be forbearing. “I have no idea how this’ll work then, with Clint and Phil having to pass through town every time they want to leave. Seems like it’d get too public fast. Not that Manhattan isn’t but… it’s sometimes worse in a smaller place.”

“Oh I took care of that,” Tony said breezily, then tilted his head to look at her. “You gonna like working with SHIELD okay? I thought that’d be a problem for an information-must-be-free type like yourself. Your hacktivist hackles not going to be a problem?”

“I’ll manage,” Skye said, on a shrug. “Sounds more stable than having people try to pay you in bitcoins and pizza, anyway. And the people are…” _The people are a blast. You’re a blast. You seriously expect me to give up the chance to work with JARVIS-- and the guy who coded him?_ She bit her lip.

That wasn’t all of it, of course. Not even _half_ of her reluctance to go back to the Rising Tide.

“I… I’m not sure I agree anymore,” she continued, “that we need to expose all the big secrets and lies out there. Some of them… some of them probably best remain buried.” 

That included Felix Blake, still sitting in a cell at SHIELD’s New York headquarters, while Nick Fury figured out what to do with him. Phil had told her they’d had to give him chalk recently; he’d split his fingertips in order to draw on the walls in blood.

That wasn’t the kind of thing that really needed to be leaked all over wikis.

“How about the one about you and the orphanage?” Tony asked, “is that a secret that doesn’t need to see the light of day?”

Skye swallowed her tongue and began to choke. 

Tony beat her on the back until she was breathing again.

“How did you--” she gasped. Although asking the question was in itself the answer, and she was absolutely not shocked when the tinny British voice piped up from her pocket.

“That is all my doing, Ms Skye,” JARVIS said. “When we first met, I noticed one document you’d pulled from SHIELD’s servers that did not seem to have any relevance to the task at hand. I also pulled your records from various state orphanages and--”

Well yes-- he would have. She hadn’t actually downloaded it with the hack she’d done for Clint and Phil, though. She’d had that file sitting on her laptop for ages, just on the edge of her vision. Sometimes, it itched at her like that spot between the shoulderblades you could never scratch on your own. At others, she’s stared at it and let her mind wander, tried to imagine some kind of closeness, arms holding a child close.

“All right,” Tony cut JARVIS off, like he was trying to drive away a particularly persistent horsefly. “Also, you’ve still got him on your phone? Really? I’m not sure if I’m touched or now actually worried he’s going to run off with you.”

“I am not capable of ‘running,’” JARVIS informed him. Skye found herself amused against her will. 

“What do you want to know about that thing?” she asked, because the other alternative was to run screaming into the night, and that didn’t seem called-for quite yet.

“What do _you_?” Tony poked her as he said it, and she finally looked him full in the face. There was nothing but kindness there in his dark eyes and the little droop to his goatee. It sat a little oddly on him, and she wondered just how often he let people see that face. “Because it looks to me like somebody left something at that orphanage, and that something was you. And… that kind of sucks.” 

“No, what sucks is that’s the only trace I’ve been able to find of my parents. At all. Ever-- except that,” Skye said, when the tide of bitterness, of loneliness, had grown so high she couldn’t build her walls fast enough to hold it back.

“And you find it on a SHIELD server,” he mused. “Well, ain’t that a kick in the pants.”

She snorted. It seemed like the logical reaction.

“You’ve been talking to Doc Halliday,” she accused him. “Yeah. It’s… weird. Weird enough that for a while, back before all this,” she swept her hand across the landscape, encompassing the entirety of both Long Beach Island and the science fiction that had become her life lately, “I thought maybe I’d try to infiltrate SHIELD. Chickened out.” 

Chickened out, left LA-- and fallen into a conspiracy which had taken her straight back in SHIELD’s front door (well, taken Coulson back in, with her riding shotgun in his tie pin). The irony had not been lost on her.

“Well,” Tony said, after a long pause in which they both appreciated the universe’s twisted sense of humor, “that’s the kind of thing that deserves looking into. It’s right up JARVIS’s alley. Wouldn’t be a trouble at all. Useful challenge. I mean, if you’re interested.”

If she was _interested_. Skye stared at her own feet for a moment, trying to un-flabber her gast. If she was interested. Like he could offer her that-- her _parents_ , god fucking damnit, like he was asking if she wanted to borrow a book. There had to be a hook.

“Is this a bribe?” she breathed, and Tony choked.

“A bribe? For _what_?” 

“To keep me from running off with JARVIS,” she said, and laughed a little at the way his eyes went round. 

“No,” he managed after a moment, “I’m not really worried about that. I mean, not just because even if mini-JARVIS there and you took off on a road trip in a Winnebago to go free unhappy bears and piss off some hayseed sherriff, he’d still be back at the Tower, too, and in Malibu, and I gotta tell you, mini-JARV is cute, but it’s not like I’m gonna pine since I’ve got the jumbo-size version at home. Then again you knew that, and that’s why I don’t have to bribe you to stay, because JARVIS is far too fascinating for you to leave.”

“JARVIS, huh?” she asked, enchanted. _Is he doing this on purpose to buy me time to think without being awkward, or is this just what happens when no-one interrupts him?_

“Okay, yeah,” Tony agreed, flapping a hand in the general direction of the beach-- and North Bar. “And your sickeningly lovey-dovey bosses, too. And yours truly, of course, though I think that goes without saying, anyway-- I think we’re going to keep you too busy to run anywhere.” 

Then, as abruptly as he’d sat down earlier, he stood up, and there was very little in the way of an intermediate step where he was rising. 

“Sorry, I’ve stunned you,” he said. “I do that; It’s a thing. Don’t worry about it at all, especially not tonight. You don’t have to decide now-- or any time, particularly. No deadline attached. Offer will still stand.”

He patted her on the shoulder and wandered back inside. Skye spent a long time, just sitting and thinking, letting the rumble of bass from the party inside wash over her and rattle her bones. 

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to know anymore. Of course she did. She did so badly that she couldn’t afford to remember it most days, because she’d end up distracted and aching, ready to do anything, or go anywhere-- hop a train, sell a kidney or a friend-- just to find out. And that kind of desperation was not acceptable.

But she had other people to think about now, Clint and Phil, Kate and America (when they came back) and Natasha and everyone on North Bar, and responsibilities too. She _had_ people. She owed it to them not to wander off in search of phantoms, at least not without warning or explanation.

“Well,” she sighed to the night sky, “not like that mystery’s going anywhere fast.” And she got up and walked inside.

\----

The sun was setting over the mountains in the west, turning the sky orange and purple at once. As it set, the moons began to resolve into view, three misshapen ghosts creeping onto stage. The trees above them, bare-branched as baobabs except where some kind of mossy vine hung between limbs, began to exhale into the evening in breaths of maple cream. 

Kate was paying less attention to them, or to the blue-tufted growths on the boulders beneath her or the little trickling stream at their feet, which she’d been told was highly acidic, than she was to her own fingers.

 _Those_ were currently teasing their way up underneath America’s shirt, nails scratching down the fine skin of her back, as Kate moved against her, stretching to nip at her earlobes. America’s gasps were growing shorter and more urgent, the way she pushed at Kate’s body, pinning her down, more fitful-- none of which was a huge surprise, given that Kate’s thigh had found its way well up America’s skirt. 

_Yes,_ Kate thought deliriously, as America wriggled underneath her, trying to get loose, and just ended up pressing herself more closely in, _yes, this is what I needed. Dad and Heather and everyone can stuff their gap year and their charities, and fuck meeting minutes._ She’d go back eventually, if for no other reason than that even Tony Stark hadn’t managed to figure out the mathematics behind getting 4G in the next dimension over. She hadn’t begun to miss her friends yet, but the space was already growing under her ribcage that she knew _would_ be filled with wanting them. She’d caught herself mentally composing an email to Clint the other day, and her SD card was already clogged with pictures sitting stagnant waiting for the Instagram upload that never came.

 _So maybe I ran a little farther than I’d needed._ After years of running just far _enough_ , rebelling only as far as she could without getting caught, it felt good to go too far in the other direction. 

She’d be back soon. She missed chili dogs.

Meanwhile, though she meant to enjoy this while it lasted, the feel of her girlfriend beneath her and the three moons above her, the wind tickling her back in whiskers, wet and slobbery as it--

Kate looked over her shoulder, to see a massive expanse of black lip above her, topped with a pair of pink nostrils so wide she could fit her hand up one. Far, far up on the beast’s nose, past the pendulous blonde-furred jowls, two sloe black eyes big as dinner plates blinked at her, in front of delicate ginko-shaped ears.

“Yeargh!” Kate screamed, and dove out of reach, rolling to her feet and dragging America with her. 

America, who was many wonderful things but also-- as it turned out-- an absolute _jerk_ , was laughing all the way.

 

**Four**

 

A couple last lonely leaves were flying, twisting on the crosswinds in the air, as Phil stepped out of the chicken coop and dusted his hands off on his jeans. He slipped the latch across the wire frame of the door and straightened.

 _Cluck?_ said one of the hens, and he looked down. It was Tony, and she was faced outwards towards the gate to the yard, scratching and bobbing and stretching her neck, her brilliant feathers puffed out in the late-autumn air. 

_Cluck, cluck-- SQUAWK!_ A black ball of feathers hit her from the side, bowling her backwards.

“Tasha,” Phil admonished the chicken, but without much hope of affecting her behavior. Ever since her adventures and her encounter with the Hulk, Tasha the hen had taken absolutely no orders from anybody, poultry or person. She strutted in front of the chicken wire now with a great deal of complacency as Tony the hen picked fitfully at her own feathers, re-settling them.

“I’m talking to chickens now,” Phil told his charges, and several Steves-- and Cousin Emily-- poked their heads up and looked at him, their beady eyes rolling. 

It had happened more frequently than he’d like to admit in the couple of days he’d been home. Talking with Lucky was normal, he’d talked with Lucky for years. It was what dogs were _made_ for. The chickens-- the chickens were new.

His newly-found poultry conversational habits weren’t the only changes, either. New, too, was the way the creaks in the cottage at night seemed to be admonishing him, the rooms seemed emptier, the Captain America vintage war bonds poster frowned harder. His bed loomed large and cold at night, like the sheets had somehow gone damp under the quilt-- whose tree of life seemed sparser than it used to, more faded.

And yes, his pillow had still smelled like him and Clint and sex, that first night. 

All things considered, Phil was probably fortunate he was _only_ talking to chickens. 

He sighed and looked up, ready to round up his furry charge and go inside. Lucky wasn’t around. He called out once, twice, then stood in the yard, confused. 

Lucky’d barely been willing to leave his side for a minute after he’d arrived on the island, not even to go roll in the decaying seaweed they’d found lining the shore on their walks. So where was he now? 

He was about to call again when he heard the bark. It started out distant and came nearer quickly, going from sharp and emphatic, to doggily pleased.

Phil walked out of the gate and let it swing shut behind him unregarded as Lucky hove into view.

There, walking by his side, was Clint.

He was as golden and warm as the dog running next to him, who was bounding and stopping then turning to streak back and tangle himself in Clint’s legs. Man and dog were both grinning.

Phil tried not to be disappointed that Clint was wearing his own clothes again-- it wasn’t like Phil’s flannels were the official uniform of North Bar or anything, and anyway if Clint kept on going eventually he was going to rip out the shoulder seam of some of those shirts.

Anyway, seeing Clint in his own wardrobe for once had its compensations, especially around the thigh and hip area. Sure, he was just wearing jeans, but they looked like they’d been fit directly to him, just so that Phil would have something to grab. And the dark shirt hugged his chest underneath a gray lined jacket that begged to be caressed, to have Phil’s hands slide under it, curving into Clint’s body heat, draw him close, tuck that big collar out of the way and-- 

\-- and Phil had done all of that, before he’d really registered that he’d left the gate behind and walked out to meet Clint. 

When he pulled back from the kiss, the cloudy dome of the sky was reeling above him, the wind was cold on his lips, and Clint was smiling at him from right up close, his eyes darting as he tried to drink in as much of Phil as he could manage.

“Hi,” Clint said after a while, and Phil melted just a little further.

“Hi,” he said back, then dove in for another rather bristly kiss. Clint responded enthusiastically enough that the kiss turned into something that involved hands in back pockets and a fair amount of panting into opened lips, as they tried to re-learn each others’ dentition by feel.

“Hmph,” Phil said when that finally ended, taking a closer look at Clint’s beard, now neatly cropped into a goatee and moustache, “did Stark put you up to that?”

“Phil!” You wound me,” Clint laughed. “Stark _hates_ it. Tried to convince me there was some Avengers rule that only one of us got to have a goatee at a time. I’m just… trying a thing. Is it an okay thing?”

“Yes!” Phil said, brushing hair out of Clint’s face so he could take a better look at him. “I just thought you’d shave it all off.”  
He’d thought, really, that the next time he saw Clint he’d be back to full Hawkeye mode. Phil wasn’t sure what to do with this damned sentimentality over the fact that Clint had decided to keep the facial hair he’d acquired on North Bar, like it was somehow a public favor of Phil’s he was wearing instead of a french cut.

“Nah,” Clint leaned out of their embrace and looked around, his chest expanding as he drank in the evening air. There was a satisfied glint in his eye, and he didn’t seem able to stop grinning. “Nah, I put effort into this. Anyway,” he winked at Phil, “my boyfriend kinda likes it.”

“Your boyfriend is over fifty,” Phil told him, trying to keep a deadpan as he watched Clint walk over to greet the chickens, bending low in what was probably a deliberate show of his assets, “and suggests we find some other phrase for that.”

“My _man_ ,” Clint drawled, still squatting, poking his fingers through the fence to the yard and the chicken wire, trying to entice Tasha closer, “can suggest whatever the hell he wants, as long as he gives me the chance to take this baby for a test drive later tonight. See how he likes it against the inside of his thighs.”

His tone of voice hadn’t changed at all, nor had he done so much as shift from boot to boot, and yet without even turning back to look at Phil, Clint had somehow managed to insinuate an entire night’s worth of distracting activities into Phil’s already teeming brain.

“Jesus, Clint,” Phil said, feeling himself go hot. “Is this what it’s going to be like all the time?”

“We can only hope,” Clint replied, standing at last and turning back to him. He held out a hand and motioned Phil forward. “Speaking of Stark, though, he and Nick have been up to no good. Made me bring something down to you. For some reason they thought you wouldn’t say no if it was me doing the presentation.”

“Oh god,” Phil said, as he took Clint’s hand. 

Only a week into this odd new job he’d apparently acquired, without anything more legal than a memo of understanding between them, and already he’d learned that no good ever came of Nick Fury and Tony Stark teaming up on him. The last time it had happened, he’d-- well, the evidence was piled all around the mansion, in the form of building materials ready to pour an asphalt landing pad over the unoffending back lawn and the piles of equipment that had been carted into the mansion to upgrade what Phil had already thought had been a perfectly adequate technology room.

As he and Clint walked back up the mansion, fingers threaded together and Lucky streaking before them, Phil tried to come to grips with this feeling that the entire world was shifting around him, secret passageways opening and closing in the air, walls shifting behind the brush, and the grass migrating beneath his feet.

It was Clint who centered him again, moving along the sandy path to the center of North Bar like he’d always known its secret ways, and Phil let out a happy little grunt before he could stop himself. Dog, chicken, island-- all felt as satisfied as he was at the moment. 

His return to North Bar was not for good and for all, not like the first time he’d stepped on her, when he’d found it difficult to leave her for more than an afternoon at a time; Clint’s room in the Tower was undergoing a similar transformation as his had, clothes shifting and making room for a foreign set of socks and underwear. Stark was fitting out a set of offices just off it, plus a smaller room for Skye. 

She hadn’t been forgotten in the transformation of the mansion, either, although she still wandered off to her old van at night while she waited for her room to be ready. It would take her a while, Phil thought, to grow used to the idea of stability, just as it was taking him a while to grow used to the idea of motion. 

Stark had other, wilder, ideas about the upgrades, and was already planning a room for Melinda May, even though Phil had told him she had an investigation to finish before Fury would accept her resignation. _She’s going to kill Stark, anyway, if he picks out the decor for her,_ Phil thought, and snorted.

“Something funny?” Clint asked, swinging their hands, and Phil shook his head. 

“Stark. This was not what I expected at all.” Phil waved at the mansion as they came around a corner, then stopped dead. 

“ _Clint_ ,” he breathed after a long moment.

“Like her?” Clint asked lightly, and Phil attempted to pull his lungs far enough back to his body to breathe. He nodded, wandering foward as if in a dream to touch the convertible’s roman red body, to run shaking fingers over her chrome. 

“She’s a little over fifty, but you wouldn’t want a younger woman, would you, babe?” Clint continued. “360 horses, a few modifications, hovercapable--”

“Hovercapa--” Phil turned to stare at him, his mind refusing to resolve that one in a way that made sense in any normal world. “She _flies_?”

“How do you think I got her here?” Clint asked, smiling. He walked forward to run the backs of his knuckles over the Corvette’s doors, giving her a fond smile.

“It’ll get you on and off the island faster, anyway. Her name--” he paused, and Phil looked over at him with trepidation-- “is Lola. And _yes_ , I told Stark. I really did. He said, and I quote, ‘if there can be two Hawkeyes, there can be two Lolas.’”

Clint paused, watching Phil, a line of caution creeping into this eyebrows.

“She… okay?”

“Mmm,” Phil said, looking down. _She’s incredible. Most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen, apart from you, anyway._ “I’m pretty sure this isn’t part of my contract.”

“Ought to have been,” Clint muttered, leaning backwards against the door, his hands splayed on the red metal body and his legs crossed. “Take it, babe. Tony’s like this, you just get used to it. He’s promised me he’ll get a garage door put in the breakaway section of the house before the snow hits, so she’s safe. I don’t know what he thinks we’re gonna do if we have to leave in the middle of a snowstorm-- but I’m afraid to ask. He might send us a jet.” 

He shrugged a little, then his voice turned sad and a little introspective.

“Anyway, odds are even it belongs here-- I think it may be the same car that’s in the family picture inside.”

“Uh huh.” Phil wasn’t paying much attention to any damned pictures, or the mansion in general, or even the sheer impracticality of having a convertible on an island small enough to walk across in fifteen minutes or less. No, not when there was Clint, draped over a damned flying ‘62 Corvette and just waiting for him to make a move. “Well, I suppose I better take it for a test drive.”

And he tipped Clint back over the side into the car, following along after despite the protests of his bruised ribs.

\----

“Oh my god, Phil,” Clint sighed a while later, while they were lying half-put together in Lola’s front seat, “how the hell do we end up doing this? We had two-- two!-- perfectly good houses around. I’m freezing.” 

He made little move to button himself back up, however, abandoning all attempts at covering up in favor of looking stunned.

Phil snorted and lifted his head-- mostly so that he could appreciate the mess he’d made of Clint’s new beard.

“Stop looking so fuckable, and I’ll stop fucking you,” he said, knowing he sounded unbearably smug. “But you can’t go surprising me on our own island, with a new goatee and a convertible named Lola, and expect to get out of this unravished. I think you’re lucky I let you get a tongue in edgewise.”

“You didn’t really,” Clint said, kissing Phil on the forehead and beginning to shove him off so that he could right himself. “But I’ll take care of that later tonight, when we get back from the fundraiser.”

“Damnit,” Phil sighed, “do we have to go?” 

They did, he knew they did, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t regret not having Clint to himself all night after so long-- okay, after a couple of days-- apart.

“Phillip Coulson,” Clint said, voice full of mock hurt, “you’re supposed to be the civic-minded one in this relationship. I just go around and shoot things and occasionally fail to put out fires. You’re the one Gansett Light was ready to pick a fight with the entirety of SHIELD and Stark Industries to keep. You get your fine ass out of that car and get up here and come be sociable with me. If you’re _really_ good, we’ll even take Lola.” 

He was laughing by the end of his attempt at a scolding.

Phil was laughing too, possibly because Clint had tugged him half upright and was manhandling him further, kissing the tender spots on his neck as he pulled Phil close. His breath was hot where Phil felt cold, his hands were perfect, splayed halfway over Phil’s ass, and Clint was altogether the most beautiful thing Phil had ever seen, and all Phil could think to say in his post-coital daze was “marry me,” before leaning in for a kiss.

It was a very _good_ kiss. Very distracting. Heady. Drove Phil to dizziness, between the lingering aftereffects of orgasms and the falling twilight. Enough so that it took him a minute to register what Clint meant, when he said:

“Did… did you mean that? Phil? Were you… you weren’t serious, right?” His eyes were wide and he’d frozen, which was no real surprise.

Phil’d done the same damn thing. The only movement in his entire body was his heart, threatening to escape his chest.

“N-- is it okay if I say ‘no’?” Phil asked him, wishing that the light were a little better.

“Do you _mean_ ‘no’?” Clint asked, still wild-eyed.

“Yeah. I-- no. No, I mean ‘not yet.’ Is that okay?” 

_If I manage to ruin this, everyone is going to kill me. Marcus on down to Lauren Halliday. If I don’t beat them all to it. Shit._

“Oh thank God,” Clint said, exploding back into life. He folded in half, collapsing at the waist and putting his face in his hands. “It was way too soon for that.” His voice was muffled but he sounded so relieved that Phil pulled him back upright and kissed him again.

“Yes,” he said, feeling his heart start to settle, “yes it really is.” He paused, tried to hold the words back, but honesty forced him to continue. 

“I mean that’s where I hope we’re going, eventually. I… I’d _like_ to go there-- but let’s face it this has been an insane few months and we haven’t even gotten time to see if what we’re doing will even _work_. I just….” Phil trailed off, aware that Clint was laughing at him, kind of shakily, true, but definitely genuine. 

He tried to feel disgruntled, or worried, but it gave way in face of the undeniable fondness in Clint’s eyes and the way his thumb traced Phil’s jawline.

“No I know. Right now I know I can see this being for good, I _want_ it to be for good.” Clint shrugged and looked down, the “but” clear in the way he toed the grass.

Phil shut out-- just for the moment-- the part of his brain that was babbling about logistics and missions and Hawkeye getting hurt and all the thousands of things that could make ‘for good’ turn into ‘for now’ or end far too soon. 

Clint looked back up, and his eyes were swimming. 

“I just… maybe we wait until that turns from ‘we want it to be for good’ into ‘we think it _will_ work for good?’”

Which was so exactly what Phil had been trying to express and utterly fumbling that he nearly proposed again. 

Their new partnership, encompassing as it did two homes, an as yet undefined contractor-employer relationship, far too much shooting and hurting and fighting, and god knew what else might be coming down the pike, was almost laughable in its degree of difficulty. Phil was confident they could navigate the shoals, but he hadn’t even had a chance to glance at the charts yet.

“Yes, exactly,” was what he said. “I haven’t even had you here for a whole season. Can we at least get that in?”

Clint laughed.

“Sounds good to me,” he said.

 

**Five**

 

He was waiting for them when they came home late at night, keeping himself still and his haunches tucked with an extreme effort, when what he really wanted to do was run.

It became a little easier to stay where he was when the flames came down from the sky. He found himself backing off, growling, as the big thing stopped belching fire out of its paws, tucked them under, and set down gently on the grass. It covered up several of the marks he usually made on his favorite stones and that one patch of bindweed, but that was no worry-- he would simply make the marks again, later, possibly on the big thing itself.

They stepped out of it, opening and closing its wings, and they smelled of meat overlaid with carbon, and of buttery grain, and of their pack. He could tell they had been with both Kisses My Forehead, who came to see him daily still, and others whose scents were fainter in his nose from the passage of time. 

Smells came to him from all over the island: salt and cold and decay, slime of seaweed and the warmth of wood, small furry things in their burrows. He drew them all in, mingled as they were, and the scent of his people, who were calling his name. 

As they came forward he ran up to meet them, barking happily, letting his rear end express his delight. 

They each bent to greet him, his Big Hands Scruffy Faces, ruffling _both_ of his ears at once, and it was so good he was nearly undone by the ecstasy of it.

When they got up, he got up too, and all three of them turned their steps down the hill, back over the sleeping grass and the soft sand, towards the warmth of indoors, next to the big heaped dunes, and their home.

\----  
THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit:  
> A few links for y'all. Here's a tumblr bonus for Chapter 27, with Natasha, Doc, Wanda... and Tony.  
> If you missed [A Gansett Christmas Eve](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/post/106176854388/washed-ashore-a-gansett-christmas-eve) in the chapter link back a ways, now is the time to tell you: it's totally Washed Ashore canon. If you're missing Gansett Light, you could do worse than spend a few minutes there.
> 
> To all of you who’ve stuck with me along the way, or discovered this sprawling happy mess of a story part way through and caught up, thank you all so much. You all are why a serial is different than a straight-up novel. The plot and outline have been mostly set since the very beginning, but your feedback, encouragement, and squees all found their way into the writing of this story.
> 
> The chickens belong to you all.
> 
> Now that we’ve gotten the sap out of the way, here’s a final offer: big as this story is, it was too short to explore everything I could explore. That doesn’t mean sequels. God, no. But if you’ve got anything you want me to babble on about-- Mike Peterson or maps to lost cities, for instance, send me an ask in my tumblr, or put it in the comments and I’ll link back to it for you. I promise you I am always happy to talk about this thing, it’s kind of been my writing life for the last year.
> 
> Which is shocking in it’s own right. I’m going to go lie down and consider that. You all have a good night, or morning, or whatever time it is for you now.

**Author's Note:**

> Intermittently, I post deleted scenes, updates, chicken pictures, and other story notes on Tumblr, at the tag [Washed Ashore](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/tagged/Washed-Ashore).
> 
> Comments-- including concrit-- always welcome, and often obsessively re-read. And please come chat with me on [Tumblr](http://kat-har.tumblr.com). The ask box is open.

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